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The Night Sky Podcast | Observing The Galactic Center
Hello, and thank you for listening to this episode of the night sky podcast. My name is Billy Newman. And I’m Marina Hanson. I want to say thanks to everybody who’s tuning in once again to listen to us talk a little bit about the events that are going to be happening in the night sky above us for the second or excuse me, the third and fourth week of July, in 2016. There’s a few things that are going on this week, which would be cool to talk about. And then a few other things that are going to happen are going to happen in like the next three weeks or so. I think those will be fun to talk about, too. Yeah, we’ve got some cool stuff coming up. It will be cool. Yeah. So I guess talking about a little bit of a news stuff where some of the skywatching events that are going to be happening this week. A few things to keep in mind. Right, is that we just had our full moon the other night. Do remember that? Yeah. Yeah. I think that was like the night teeth right? 19th to 20th. Yeah, the first shoot. Yeah. So now it’s a little bit past for now. It’s a waning gibbous moon. And that’s great, because it’s going to be coming up later and later into the evening. And so I think like, what would it be for? If we’re looking for dark skies and the southern sky, or you know, like, in our viewing area for the evening, it’s going to be great, during the next couple of weeks, we’re gonna have a great opportunity to, to get to see some dark skies in the south get some good Milky Way viewing in. And that will kind of come back into play for some of the stuff we’ll talk about in a little bit. But I think that that’s going to be cool. So I think, what is it by the next night? Or what’s today’s like the 20/24. So by the 25th, or 26th, we’re going to be coming into a place where the moon will be coming up after midnight, maybe toward 1am 2am. And that’ll make it much easier to get some observations in with dark skies between nine o’clock and midnight.
Yeah, that’d be great. It’s been a little bit harder these last couple weeks, that’s been brighter.
Yeah. Well, that’s like we noticed, remember, like way back when we went to the alvord Desert. And we were out there to do you know, a lot of observations, but there’s just a section like, you know, a two week period of the month that it is difficult to get deep sky observations. And because the moon is so bright, or it occupies so much of the sky. Yeah, it’s way right. So. So there’s a few good things about that, though. And part of that is that this week, we’re coming into the Delta aquarid meteor shower. And you were looking this one up to you, right? Yeah, the meteor shower that’s coming up, and I guess it’s gonna be there is it? So here’s the thing. And like, you know, this is that the proceed meteor shower is going to be coming up around August 11 10th 12th. Yeah, we’re gonna be in that period. Yeah. Which is going to be cool. And I’m really excited to go look at that meteor shower. And that’s really the star of the summer, like you’ve seen before? You know, that’s the one that’s the most fun to get out. And yeah, the most viewing? Yeah, yeah, I think there’s one a minute, a lot of it depends on the time of year. And often, it’s never been one minute when I’ve been out making observations of it. But when it peaks, it really is a pretty impressive meteor shower for us in the Northern Hemisphere for this time of year. But I assume that the Delta aquarid meteor shower is going to see more the meteors come out of the constellation Aquarius, that’s normally how they’re identified for meteor showers. Is that like the Delta aquarid meteor shower means that it’s going to be coming out. The meteors are going to be coming from the direction of Aquarius in the evening sky. And same for like the proceed meteor shower we’re going to be looking at, at meteors coming out of the constellation of Perseus. Yes. So that’s kind of the idea behind it. But I guess what they were saying is about 15 an hour is what they’re projecting. That doesn’t seem like too strong of a peak. But it’s enough to you know, to go out and get it or get an option to go see a few and it’s kind of fun to see, I remember a handful of good ones coming out during during this time of year though. It’s a good ramp up as it comes into the Perseids. And just a couple of weeks, so you get a lot of meteor shower activity over the next little bit. Yeah, that’ll be pretty cool to check out. What day what date is that start? I think it’s like the 24th 25th or so. So I understand, right? So it’s probably like, like kind of the middle of this next week. This is sort of a longer one. And it’s a slower burn, right? Like what we’re talking about is that the peak period for for the meteor shower isn’t going to be as strong, like we’re only going to get 15 to maybe maybe 20 you know, meteors per hour that we’re going to get a good observation of whereas like with the Percy is we’re getting one minute and so that peak is way more noticeable. So if I understood, right, it’s gonna be like a couple days, you know, it’s or it’s a wider span of a period that we’re going to have some more Meteor activity in the sky out of that, which would be cool. I think it’s most of this week, which would be kind of fun to get to go And if you’re lucky to catch a couple, couple meteors, little shooting starts going by.
Yeah, we should go just outside of the city a little bit this next week and see I really like to get some viewings.
Yeah, you and I should push a lot this week to get further out of the city lights and do some cool observations, do some cool night astronomy photos, I have a couple ideas that I want to try out with you too. That’d be cool, we’ll probably get some fun stuff. I want to try that. That other camera with the lens. That’s the that really wide angle lens, we can do a little bit of what we’re talking about in the Astro photography episode, where we have a really wide angle lens that we’re able to shoot. So we get longer exposures over the evening sky above us so we can get the kind of the more light the brighter sky. That’d be cool. I think we can check out some cool stuff in the in the Milky Way. By using that method. Yeah, that’d be really fun. I’ll make that stuff up. Yeah, I think it’d be cool. Yeah, we should try and do that this next weekend, especially because it’s July for us, you know, it’s coming up to the end of July. And it’s strange that we’re kind of now on the downhill side of the season. We’re gonna start sloping in more toward fall. And you really just a few weeks by like, I mean, I know it’s about a month from now. But it really seems to wrap up pretty quick. It’s as fast as it’s been a month ago from today. That seems like it just happened a minute ago. The end of the end of June, you know, and so it’ll be a couple of weeks into August and we’re start feeling that fall feeling up here. The days are gonna get a lot shorter. Even in like a week and a half, we’re gonna notice how much darker it is. where we’re at when or how much earlier it is that the sun goes down. It’ll be strange, but it’ll be dark by nine o’clock again. Yeah, pretty strong pretty well. And Twilight. Yeah. So we’re going to see that kind of really rapidly drop off as the daylight hours start to get dimmer and dimmer and dimmer. As we get I think in like September, the time of sunset is about 715 or so. Or, you know, it’s the time it starts getting dark. And that’s how fast we see things change as we get closer and closer to the equinox.
Yeah, I was gonna say I think that Cassiopeia is starting to come into view, which is a fall. Yeah, constantly,
a lot more interview. Yeah, I was looking at it the other day, and it’s definitely on the rise, we’re going to start seeing Cassiopeia and Perseus come up. And Andromeda, we’re going to see the rise of Andromeda come up, and then we’re gonna see Capella. That’ll be really cool. So that’s, that’s what it’s like the onset of fall. And that’s those things that you start seeing. In the in the late evening, at the beginning of or end of August, beginning of September, you start seeing those changes in the stars, and a lot of the summer constellations like what we talked about last week, with the Summer Triangle, and Scorpio and all of that, getting much further over into the West. And then as late night comes on, like after 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock midnight, you’re gonna see most of those constellations far enough over that they’re really pretty close to the western horizon. And they’re just past our view, all of a sudden, which will be strange to kind of see how, how quickly the the stars above us kind of seem to change as we drop from season to season. But it’ll be fun. I’m glad that, you know, there’s some new stars on the rise, we should do an episode about Cassiopeia and Andromeda and all the section of stuff that you can see over there. That’s really fun with binoculars to like what we talked about before, it’s still in that, that belt of the Milky Way. So there’s all that really dense clusters and observable material out there in that area. It’ll be fun to check out.
Yeah, it’ll be really cool as it starts coming more and more interview.
I think so too. Yeah. So the other thing that’s going on this week, and this is what we talked about it before in a past episode back in January, was the the occultations. Do you remember this? Yeah, idea. And it’s when something is occulted.
I think everybody can check it out with the I think it was like Episode Four, the occultation of all the urine, which was an episode that we recorded back in early January of this year. So that probably talks about it a lot. But all the bronze is a special star because it’s right on that plane of the ecliptic or, or the moon is going to pass. Now there’s a few other things that we’ve learned about the draconic cycle and how the moon kind of shifts six degrees above and below the ecliptic, and that there’s these nodes where it’s right on the money. But, but what that means is that the moon kind of floats up and down. So that’s why we don’t see an occultation of all the brawn every month. But every once in a while, it seems like every six months or every and every once in a while and it cycle, we do get the moon covering all over on in totality, which is pretty cool. It does this with a few other stars in the sky. And it does this with a few other things. But it seems like all abroad is one of the most common or reoccurring stars that it seems to a call. And so we have an occultation coming up on July 29, which is going to be pretty interesting to see but it’ll probably be more complicated. It’s going to be an observation that you would make right before For dawn in the morning sky, because it’s a winner constellation, right? It’s in Taurus. Right and and so since it’s a winner constellation is going to now just be past the sign after it’s been in the sun for since Taurus is a zodiac sign, and a constellation that’s on the ecliptic, it’s now pass the sun, it’s in the morning sky. And that’s where we’re gonna see all the bronze shining bright, up in the morning sky. And then now the moon covering it over for us in the Northern Hemisphere. So it’d be kind of interesting to check out if you do get a chance to I looked at the occultation. That was back in January. I think there might have been another one since then. But But I remember looking at it. And it’s interesting is just what you notice is that there’s a star, not there. And then there’s a moon there. So so there’s not more to see, it actually just ends up being less to see but and this is interesting. And I had not heard of this before. There is more to see if you’re in the right part of the planet. Now what what is called as a grazing occultation. And that’s where and what so I before I get ahead, before I get ahead of myself, what it is, is down in I think El Paso, Texas, there’s this line for the similar to an eclipse, you know what I’m talking about where there’s different sections of the world where you get to observe the eclipse? Yeah, yeah. So similarly, we to this one, we’re dealing with an occultation, there’s going to be this place on the planet where it’s going to be outside of the moon’s, the moon’s radius, or the moon’s diameter. So we would just see both objects still there would not be inoculation. And then from one perspective, one point of view up here in the Northern Hemisphere, the moon would be occulting. Oliver on. So there’s this one spot, though, where it’s going to graze. And we’re going to see that the star Aldebaran, just on the surface of the moon. And it’s going to pop in and out of a view right on that line. So I think it’s like part of El Paso and sort of a diagonal line up that sort of cuts and curves over the South. And so it seems like it’s kind of through part of Texas and maybe Louisiana, and Arkansas, a few a few sections of area like that there might be a line that you can see, what I looked at was the international occultation timing Association, you can go to occultations.org, forward slash alder baronne. And, and there you can see a lot of information about about the July 29, occultation and the line that this greys is going to be happening. But it looks like it’d be kind of cool, since it’s happening in the morning, what you’d see if you’re looking at it with binoculars, or overtime, and I saw a couple videos that were like time lapses of this, this occurrence. But you see the the mountains of the moon out way in the distance cover up as the as the moon passes over all over on, you see, really in a refined amount of detail, you’re able to see the mountains of the moon occult right on the edge of the moon that we can see the disk that we’re able to view from Earth, we’re able to see the moon kind of cover up the star. And then as it drops out past that mountain, we’re able to see the star again from our position of earth. And so you see the star basically, from our view, pop in the light, you can see the star and the moon and then you see the star disappear behind the moon. And then once again, you see the star appear again, and then disappear behind the moon right on that edge before the moon passes over it and the occultation is over. So it’s kind of an interesting thing that you can probably make out. And since it’s July 29, we’re probably going to have good viewing weather in the morning. Or like, you know, pre dawn light, which will be a good opportunity for us to see like in the winter time. Remember, it was difficult because there’s a strong chance that, you know, there’s just going to be too cloudy or too cold or too rainy because of weather to get a chance to make any observations of it for real. So I know it’d be cool. I think we should try. If we can wake up extra early.
Yeah, that’d be cool. That’d be cool. Go see, the star is not there. Hey, look at that. I can see all Oberon. grazing aka occultation. sounds really cool, though. It does. Sounds like it’d be more interesting observation if you’re able to do it. Yeah,
it seems like it’s kind of unique. And it’s really not in the same place a lot of the time, like the line that that grazing occupation is going to occur. Seems like it shifts around similar to how an eclipse would shift around on the surface of the planet, there’s probably a cycle to it, or like, you know, some kind of period repetition that it does, like when we talked about the metonic cycle, and how the the growth of an eclipse happens over time. I think it’s really interesting. And that works, but I think be similar in this way of how these occupations have auberon occur over time and where that grazing line is. It seems cool. It seems cool. So I don’t know it’s a small thing, but it’s one of those those little skywatching events that would be kind of fun to see. I was like seeing that Stuff like that. I think I remember. She was the other one. I remember there was a time when the moon occulted Mars in the sky, I think was back in 2007. I remember watching it from the back door of the place I was living at in Corvallis. But yeah, there’s this time when you have the moon, it was like a crescent moon in the evening sky. And this is when Mars was really dim. On what, during a period that the, the, the planet Mars was on the far side of us in its orbit. Like right now it’s close edge. And so that’s why it’s really big and bright. Is that a period when it’s pretty small, and really just as apparent to us as it would be just as a little star in the evening sky. So it wasn’t super apparent. But you can you can tell, you know, you could tell it was a planet. But But yeah, there’s the crescent moon that kind of passed over for a few hours. And I remember it was April, so it was partly cloudy. And you got to see it for like a little bit. And then it was too cloudy, and then it couldn’t see it anymore. And then you see it again for a little while. So it kind of went back and forth. But it’s cool to see, it’s really fun when you get to. And this one would be kind of cool, too, because so what’s different about this occultation of all the Bron is that the moon is going to be much closer to a crescent moon. And so I think that makes it more observable for us. The tricky thing is that it’s going to be near sunrise, it’s going to be getting closer to that point where we’re getting into Twilight and then dawn. And that’s going to make it a little bit more difficult just because you’re not going to be able to see as many fine details in the night sky. You’re not gonna see. Yeah. And that was, that was a tricky thing, right? Is that all the brawn is one of the brightest things in that section of the sky. Yes, there’s Orion. And there’s a few of the other stars that are nearby. But in that formation, at least, that’s what you notice, first, you know, is is all around. And so when that’s gone, and the moon is right there, it’s bright enough that it really blows out the rest of the constellation of tourists around it. So sometimes you just like, well, I just need the moon, I didn’t even really notice that there was a star I couldn’t see. So I don’t know. So if it was like that sometimes. But it would be a cool, cool opportunity to see it. Because I remember back in January, when we were looking at it, it was really, I think it was a waxing gibbous moon that we were looking at during the occultation. And so that’s where it was just really almost full, it’s probably like three or four days from the position of full in the sky. And that made it so much brighter in the evening sky, that it was difficult to see really anything else in the evening sky around it at all. And so that’s where it was, you know, a lot more difficult. And that’s why this time, given them with the crescent, it probably be darker out for a while. And you can see more things around it and probably get some observations of like the Percy is next to it and the rest of that V that’s there, that creates the head of Taurus. So there’s probably some more stuff that you can kind of poke around and get a view of.
Yeah, that’d be cool.
Yeah, so it was really cool. The other day, my friend Dave and I, we went out and we grabbed the telescope, and we did some truck trip stuff, we were driving around in the mountains for a little while, but when it got dark out, we we tried to set everything up, so that we could get a couple observations in with the telescope out there. And we still have the planets up we there’s you know, like we were talking about last week, there was Venus in the evening sky and Mercury for a while, but there’s a real close to the horizon. And so we waited a while so that it was really pretty dark out and we were looking out to the west. And really now it’s amazing to see like just a few months ago how we were looking at Jupiter being in opposition to us back in April rising right as the sun was setting and then now as we’re getting deep into the year we see Jupiter far out to the west in the evening and then it sets pretty quickly you know after that, but I think it’s still in Leo and I think Leo is going to be in the sun during the month of August so we probably only have a few more weeks of good observations of of Jupiter before it gets too deep into the to the western sky you know around sunset, but it was fine we we pulled out the telescope and set it up cited it into Jupiter and I think we were able to we spotted two moons definitely probably kalisto and Gainey Mead, but I didn’t really ever know if that’s a if it’s a fair statement to make, you know, you’re never sure. Yeah, like could that be it? Or could that not be? So I think there was well there was just too much light where we were at to make out any finer details. Maybe it was the telescope itself too. But we could definitely make out two of them. And I think what we were figuring is that at least one of them was like behind Jupiter during that time which happens like what we noticed when we were looking at the evening sky to or looking at a Jupiter specifically is that you know every part of the cycle of the moon’s rotating around Jupiter is that every once in a while they get behind Jupiter’s able to see him for a bit of time. So it was cool the school setting that in and then there’s, there’s Mars over in Libra it’s moving quickly now and pro grade back into into the constellation of Scorpio which I out a little bit, it’s a red dot. It’s really cool. It’s, I think, most fun just viewing with the naked eye. And it’s getting a lot dimmer. Now if you notice, we should we should go out tonight and look at this. But if you make, like observation, or you kind of think about, let’s say this pictures that we took maybe almost two months ago now at the end of May, we could see the positions of, of Saturn, Mars and the constellation Scorpio. And where they are and what we were looking at as Mars being much higher. Above, above the southern horizon, it would be much higher up and higher than Saturn rang the constellation of Scorpio, but what we noticed is that as a window into retrograde and dropped back into Libra, it got lower in the sky. And now as it’s coming back in to Scorpio, it’s going to be at a lower position, it’s actually going to be underneath Saturn, as it crosses through. Whereas before it would have been above Saturn, it’s going to be below Saturn. Now as it drops through now that it’s back into pro grade motion, and, and moving are transiting back in through through the constellation of Scorpio. So it’d be cool, it’d be cool to see that’s going to be happened in just a couple of weeks, I think, during the period of the proceed meteor showers that we’re talking about. And like that, second week of August, we’re going to start seeing Mars, really close back in toward Antares and in that section of the sky there in the heart of Scorpio. So that’ll be kind of cool to get to poke around and check out. But we decided in Saturn after that. And that was really sad. It’s been really tough decided a few of these times, especially with the equipment that we’ve got, but we were able to pull in Saturn in the night sky and get some observations that night was really cool, because you can really make up those rings really well. You remember checking outside and how well you can see those rings at this time of year.
Yeah, it’s great. It has like a little tilt to it. And you can really see them going around.
Yeah, you really can’t you can see the separation. There’s like a gap in the ring. Yeah, main ring, and there’s a gap in it. It’s really cool that you can make out those kind of details with it. I think it’s it’s pretty fun. I was looking at a couple pictures that they had on on Sky and telescope that some amateur astronomers made back in June, I think on June 3, when I was in when Saturn was at opposition to the earth. And those are really cool. But it it really seems like you have this perspective where you’re kind of looking up at the South Pole of Saturn up to the rooms that are kind of that’s what it seems like it looks like I might have that twisted a little bit. But it seems like yeah, we’re kind of looking up at the bottom of it right now. During its its rotation around the sun, which is pretty cool. And that’s that’s what gives us that that great viewing angle of the rings are able to see. And it’s kind of fun. So it’s really cool. I did well I we weren’t able to spot any of the moons around Saturn. But I’m sure that’s because like the telescope is just, it’s like a three and a half inch or faster reflector. reflector telescope. And that’s where we need something that’s bigger. Yeah, I see Titan and pay fees. Oh, there’s a handful of cool moons around Saturn, that we should definitely get a chance to look at. I think it’s been too long. We got to work on getting a cool telescope. Yeah, we need to get an upgrade for that guy get upgrades figured out. We were looking at the galactic center too. After we looked at Saturn, it’s right over from that. So looking at like Scorpio we have that really dense area of the sky down there where you see like Scorpio and then the tail of Scorpio. And then there’s that gap in between the tail of Scorpio and then the teapot shape. That’s that asterism in Sagittarius. And that’s that’s a fun one to look at. But in that area of the sky, especially if you have dark skies. There’s so much dense Milky Way. I don’t know features right behind Sagittarius in that area. And it’s really cool to look at Have you been out in dark enough skies to get to see some of that. Yeah, but not. Not really. Yeah. Enough, we should go out even real soon, we should go out probably during this period of of like a new moon, we should go out to a really dark area so that we can try and get some good, some good views of the that area of the sky. But Sagittarius is really cool. There’s a section and it’s strange. You really can’t see it. In an area where there’s a lot of light pollution like tonight in the city here, even at a dark night as it is. Or just outside of town. It’d be a difficult feature to try and make out. But there there’s this kind of glowing spot that’s right out the front tip of the tea pot. If you’d imagine the spout of the tea pot and that asterism did you go just out from that and down slightly. There’s sort of a glowing section that’s a bit brighter. And it’s just the Milky Way. It’s just a bright section in the Milky Way there. But it’s a bit brighter and you can kind of make it out. It’s difficult if you look directly at it. We talked about before. Do you remember the side vision? Yeah, you’ve explained this to me before?
Yeah, it’s really tricky. Our eyes are peculiar and we’ll get back to that feature in a second. But to spot this feature, you almost have to use your side vision. And it’s this thing that skywatchers have use for a long time. It’s it has to do with the anatomy of the eyeball when we’re looking at the eyeball. And then the retina, I guess what you have is cone cells and Rod cells. And your cone cells are more densely packed and located right at the center of your eye right in that focus point, like where you look at. And those are really good at identifying the separation of different colors, and different tones and color like that. But they’re not as good at recognizing contrast, or separations and brightness and darkness. And that’s where your rod cells come into play. And those are more populated on the periphery of your vision. And so those are really good at picking up lights and darks. And that’s why when you look directly at something that’s a very dim object, it’s almost difficult to see one of these dim stars that you thought you could see a second ago and your peripheral vision. And what they notice is by using your side vision, by looking a little bit off from your dead center focus that your eyes would naturally draw themselves to, you focus yourself just a little bit to the side of that. And then you try and use. It’s difficult almost to look at something but then focus at a different point in your peripheral vision. But you can get good at it after a while. And it’s it’s an easy thing to do. But you look just a little bit to the side of it. And then you’ll notice that those dim objects, those fifth magnitude stars, or there’s those kind of more delicate features in the evening sky that seem like they’re really dim, you’re able to make those out a little bit better. Because just because you’re using your side vision, and there’s more sensitive cells too bright and dark. But it’s cool. So when you look out to Sagittarius, you can see this kind of glowing patch there. And that’s really close to the galactic center of the Milky Way, which is pretty cool. That feature has a name to it, I should, I should try and look it up some time. But it’s really cool, because that section of the Milky Way there would be the center of our galaxy is what we figured out. And it’s really weird to try and perceive that, you know, trying to perceive how that the geometry of our galaxy is set up. And the way that we look out into the evening sky, it’s very difficult to figure out or to understand. Yeah, it is.
It is pretty complicated. But when we do look up, what we’re able to see is that we have all the sections of the Milky Way above us where we have these really bright stars. You know, we have like what we talked about last week, the Summer Triangle where we have Altair, we have Vega, we have the NAB that really that other really bright star that’s super far away. And all of this all that section, even out into Cassiopeia and Capella, and further on from that. And what we see in the winter constellations of Orion, and then further down into canopus, all this section of really bright first magnitude stars that we see they’re all part of the Galactic disk that we would look out to like if you were to imagine that that middle school science picture that you would see of a spiral galaxy, one of those distance galaxies, which the one we looked at, I think is either a facsimile, or it’s a photograph that Hubble took of another spiral galaxy that would be similar in size, similar in shape. But we’re not able to photograph our own galaxy, of course, because we’re not able to get out of it. It’s too big. I think it’s 100,000 light years across. And so our son is nestled into one of those spirals about two thirds of the way out from the center as it is. And so when we look out into the milky way above us, we’re looking into our spiral arm of the galaxy, which is a peculiar thing to try and perceive. Yeah, yeah, right. And then we’re also looking more distant into that out further and further and further into other sections of the galaxy. When we look into that milky substance that we see that’s distant stars that are super far away, maybe hundreds of 1000s of light years, or or Well, maybe not, not hundreds of 1000s, less than 100,000. But up to 10,000. Maybe I don’t know what they’d be. But there’s deep sky objects that are in that area that you look out into. And then a lot of the things that are closer to like, like Vega we were talking about it’s 27 light years away, things that are more at our local group close to us and in our neighborhood where our stars, which is pretty interesting how that how that works. But then as we look further south at this time of year, what we’re going to see is, as we get into Sagittarius, there’s a really dense cluster of Milky Way in that area. You know how it looks like the Milky Way, it doesn’t quite look like stars themselves individually, but it looks murky, almost or looks as it is. And so as we get closer and closer to Sagittarius, that’s where that galactic center is where the bigger section is. And I think that’s because we found like an X ray source over there. When we started doing things with radio telescopes. What we noticed is that when we pointed our telescope, our radio in that direction, we would get a signal kind of a scratchy hissy signal. And that was from the galactic center, we pick up this tone from it this RF signal that would come out from, I think probably whatever X ray source it is, I don’t know if they say it’s a black hole there, or if it’s just a lot of energy, I’m not quite sure, I think they say it’s a black hole near that, that center cluster of our galaxy is, is different different stars that have collapsed into each other to make a larger black hole at the center. But that’s just who knows, we haven’t been there. But that is the the galactic center over there. And it’s pretty cool to kind of perceive if you can, when you’re trying to think about where are places in the galaxy, it’s kind of interesting.
It’s cool. And then what you’ll notice really particularly and especially this time of year is a great time to start proceeding This is that thing of that section of the Milky Way that we look at has really all of the dense, bright first magnitude stars that we have. And then there’s a handful that are separated or spread out from that, that point of the disk. But what you notice is that further away from that disk that we look at that is the Milky Way, the thinner and thinner the density of the stars that we look out and see in the evening sky are so as we as well, let’s see, as like lire and Cygnus, and aquilla get higher and higher in the sky. Those constellations have Vega, Altair and the NAB in them and that center mass of the Milky Way as that gets higher and higher. What we noticed on the eastern horizon is Pegasus starts to rise up Pegasus the great square, it’s known as that because there’s a really big area of the sky where there’s, you know, a square made up of the four second magnitude stars that make up that big box of Pegasus. But in the center of that there’s really almost no bright stars, there’s no other material there. And it starts to get what I’m saying is, and what you start noticing is that that part of the sky gets much, much less dense in stars like after Sagittarius as Capricorn starts rising. And as Aquarius starts rising, what we notice is that there’s really almost no first magnitude or second magnitude stars in that region. Until we get to family, which starts to rise probably in the beginning of September. If you stay up late enough, you’ll probably start seeing family will come up and that’s the brightest star in the southern sky for the fall sky. And it’s really strange how that is but you just see a big gap. Since there’s so much activity right now in our false got, we have the galactic center, we have Sagittarius Scorpio, the two planets is really active and bright. And then in a few months was noticed that whole section The sky is really almost vacant. And that’s because we’re looking away from the galactic center, we’re looking away from that, that disk, that dense disk of the Milky Way that has the population of all the bright main sequence first magnitude stars that we’re able to see. And then later in the year, we start seeing the other end of the Milky Way start coming up. As we see more of Cassiopeia and more of the Pleiades and all Tiburon and Orion and everything that kind of carries south from that including, you know, procyon and Sirius and canopus down into the southern hemisphere. That’s all still on a line of the Milky Way where we have a lot of that activity of those bright stars. But it’s cool. It’s really strange to kind of see how the, how everything kind of spins around us throughout the year around the sun. So it’ll be fun. It’ll be cool to get to check out but but yeah, you guys should try and make out some observations of that. our listeners I mean, all 12 of them should should take a second to kind of think about where the galactic center is over in Sagittarius and how different stars how different space looks just a few degrees past that as it gets dimmer or thinner and thinner. In its density of stars in the evening sky. It’d be kind of cool. Yeah, it’s really neat spot to be looking at it. I thought so too. Yeah, it’s a it’s a great time of year. It’s a really fun area to look in the sky for us in this area. So it’ll be cool. But I was gonna say and you should talk about this a lot. But we had another listener email come in, once say thanks so much to Jason too, for getting a hold of us again. That was really cool. He got a hold of us one time before, but it’s really fun to hear that, that someone’s been listening to it. At least a couple more times since since I don’t know whenever it was back in March or February that he got a hold of us before. But it was great. He sent us an email had a handful of photographs of the moon that he took. Did you get to see those?
Yeah, I did. That was really cool. I think he said us for photos over they took the moon of this telescope camera. Really cool. Yeah. Got some mounts to set it up.
Yeah, yeah, that’s one thing that we got to figure out is the the mounts for our camera to catch our camera sent you to the telescope
and the telescope that we should be attaching. Oh. But yeah, that’s super cool. Thank you so much, Jason for send those photos over to us. And I think he was mentioning that. On the chance he gets for another outing. He’s gonna try to do some planetary photos which would be super cool. I’d like to see
if he can be so cool. I will see some Saturn or some Jupiter. You pretty cool. Yeah,
definitely, definitely a good inspiration for us to, to get a seven shape telescope,
I’ve been looking at those pieces like it’s just like an attachment that would go on to the eyepiece. And then there’s like, just the lens mount on the other end of that. So we can take our camera like the d3 or something, we could take that and just snap it onto that. And then effectively the lens to the camera is the telescope, right? I don’t understand, really. And then I’m sure there’s lots of tutorials out there, I don’t understand that you cite the telescope in at that point, like now that the cameras hooked up to it, and you have to like, wiggle it around all the time. So I’m sure there’s a way to do it, you probably just do it through the eyepiece in a frustrated manner. Gosh, what do I do, but there’s probably a cool way to do it, I think it’d be fun to try out, we should try and get a piece. I think I’ve seen cheap versions of that around for a lot of money, but less money. Yeah, it’s like probably 200 bucks or something. we shake it up. I think so too, I think it’d be really cool. I’ve also seen these other pieces too, I don’t think this would be the right choice for us. But I’ve seen these other pieces where it just it’s an Astro photography camera. It’s like special built for that purpose. And so instead of, we have like a camera camera, like a DSLR. What this is, is basically it’s a digital sensor, it’s like a, you know, like a full frame sensor or something like that, that’s kind of specially encased in this block. And that’s the telescope camera. And so it’s really just made to fit onto a telescope. That’s what its whole purposes, those are like, those are like 600 to $1,000, probably more than $1,000, you could probably get some great features out of that. I bet there’s probably some better quality options that you have with that. But I’m not sure though, I’m not completely convinced that it would be the best thing for it or not. But we should look into it a little bit. I just see those listed on the side is little peripheral items for your telescope into into Astro photography. But yeah, it looks like this little encased metal box that just kind of clamps on and that’s your image sensor. First telescope kind of collects light. Yeah,
if you if you’re not really into photography, but you want to do Astro photography, that’s probably a good option.
No, it really is, I’m sure that that that special built tool is is better for for that purpose, you know what I mean? Like various features and options for for doing Astro photography, that would be better than the just like a regular Nikon or Canon DSLR added onto the top of the telescope. So and this probably has to do with some of the optical quality that are the mounting options that you have to get to the telescope. I’m not sure what the weakest link in that chain would be. But I bet if you have a cool camera for Astro photography, it would be better prepared to do you know, cool planetary photographs and stuff. It might be better low light to that’s what I wonder a lot about, you know, it’s like how do you get like, Great resolution or more light into the camera? If everything’s so dark or so dim? Like, how do you how do you do it without doing like a long exposure on your camera, right? If you’re taking pictures of planets or something with the moon, you could probably get away with it pretty well, which I really liked about this photos we saw from Jason, was that, you know, it’s bright enough that you can kind of expose for it in your camera. But I wonder if you could do it as easily. If you’re taking photographs of Jupiter and its moons, you know, can you still do 30th of a second exposure or 10th of a second expert, whatever it would be
about that too. I think it’s a little bit different with telescopes, because or when you’re doing photos with a telescope because the telescope magnifies what you’re looking at. But it also brings in a lot more light. Yeah, it
does. And that’s what you get with I understand right, you get a huge benefit in your resolution, what color and what you’re really able to see. So based on how big the diameter of your Yeah. Yeah. And that’s what’s able to collect more light. I think that’s your right, what helps show a lot more light. Yeah, you’re probably able to do it easily,
then I this is something that we should look into a little bit more, I only read just a little bit about it, but they’re sort of different kinds of telescopes that are better for the type of Astro photography that you’re trying to do. Like if you’re trying to photograph planets specifically, I think you want something that’s a longer focal length for your telescope because of the way that it collects. Like to to correct it. Okay, and then if you’re trying to do like, like deep space galaxy is or like Nebula, and things like that, then that’s like a fast telescope. Hmm. Oh, I
get that. Yeah. So similar, like what we’re talking about, like a fast lens like hey, yeah, wider.
Yeah, yeah. And it’s a wider one so that I guess it does better at capturing those fainter or soft things. Interesting. So that’s the nice thing about a little bit yeah, we should scopes
and like Jason was recommended, we need to get a better telescope telescope. When she said that we’re I think we’re trying to set up a Patreon page. I want to get that going. Our goal should be to build a marina telescope. There we go. mega bunch observations.
How cool. That’d be pretty cool. Yeah, we should we should start looking into the cat helpscout. We should grab. Oh, yeah, definitely. There’s so many options out there. There are a ton.
Yeah, we should get some cool that we can kind of grow with for a while. I want to have something is good, but kind of small enough that we can pack around and making several I want. Yeah, but I really want to get a, you know, a front facing objective lens that’s that’s big enough to get to get what we’d want, right? Yeah, to get some good, good observations and get some good resolution be able to see some more stuff. I think it’d be fine. Like right now we can just barely make out those red bands on Jupiter. That’s really all we can make out. And there’s so much more you can see with just a better resolution and a telescope. Definitely. It’d be really fun. And there’s all those deep sky objects too. Which would be really cool. Yeah, there’s a lot of fun stuff like these globular clusters, where you just see this little patch. It’s like 1000, little stars, I’ll kind of clumped together, that sort of stuff. It’s really fun to where you get to make a look that I didn’t know that was there, or Nebula or other other features that are really pretty to see. There’s a bunch of fun stuff that you can make out in the evening sky, we should get that that deep sky book. Oh, yeah, I want to I do deep sky would be really good. That kind of runs down really meticulously everything out to like a 12th magnitude object that’s observable in the evening sky. And in every constellation. It’s just this really good in depth chart to find it and identify different features in the night sky. And I think that’s something that definitely qualifies for us to try and have definitely cool. And if anybody out there is interested in stuff, I bet that would be a huge, huge benefit to your, your observations throughout the year is having something like that, that you can go to in reference. Yeah,
it’s really, it’s really useful, especially when you’re new to it still. And you’re, you don’t always remember exactly where things are in relation to each other. It’s really nice, or it’s really cool. Just having a reference.
Yeah, I totally agree. I think having like a real reference, like that is great. When I was a kid, I had just a little constellation book stuff. And that was what I used all the time. So I think I’m in like a real a real chart. That would be a big game changer for us. I don’t know, we’ll have to check it out sooner or later. But I think that’s just about everything we have to get into for this episode of the night sky podcast. On behalf of Marina Hanson. I want to say thank you all very much for listening, please rate review and subscribe to our podcast if you want to give it a couple of things to check out. I think it’d be rad. But yeah, on behalf of Marina Hanson, thanks a lot for listening. My name is Billy Newman. And I hope you guys get to tune in next time for Episode 18 of the night sky podcast.