The (Professional) Backyard Astronomer - Sixty Symbols

so here's my little tv scope set up on the patio you've got this lifelong love of astronomy i imagine you'd had many telescopes over the years you're going to set me straight here i have so no i've never owned a telescope when i was a kid my dad had a really nasty little cheap telescope that we messed around with for a bit um and i've got an old nautical telescope that just sort of lies around the place but i've never owned a serious look at the sky kind of telescope until why is that why is that why have you never had one um partly because so the times i've actually tried to set up telescopes myself it turns out i'm pretty hopeless at it you know if you go to an observatory there's a nice big telescope which somebody really competent has set up and controls and runs for you if it comes to trying to line up your own telescope and getting all the bits of kit to work that's not really something i'm particularly good at so it's never really appealed all that much until now what is the skill you lack like what's the thing about you that made you not good at setting one up it is this strange thing so years ago i used to run field trips with undergraduates out to the canary islands where there was a telescope that we used out there which is very basic telescope and it was very interesting you could see amongst the students some of them just had this magic touch that they could just line the telescope up point it roughly where they wanted it to be and there would be the object they wanted to look at whereas other people could be you know really technically competent and try really hard and never get a decent image out of it and unfortunately i'm in the latter category all right it's just like a it's just like a knack is that like a magic touch it does it is yeah it really is a bit of a touch to it um and it's just not something i'm particularly good at why has this changed professor did you take the plunge because of the sort of the lockdown situation or no it was a complete coincidence so actually a couple of years ago i backed a kickstarter which is something i'd never done before but there was this kickstarter for basically someone was saying we're going to produce a completely idiot-proof telescope and so i figured that was just the thing for me um so i backed it really early and then it sort of disappeared for a while and i didn't actually think all that much more about it until i got a notification saying you know your telescope's being shipped and conveniently it arrived just as the lockdown was beginning so right at the beginning of lockdown i got a nice telescope to play with so now you've been doing some lockdown astronomy i have yeah not exactly from the ideal site in that it's sort of i can't go any further than my own back garden at the moment but i can take the telescope out there and stick it in the back garden and point it up at the sky and start doing some astronomy the only slight snag i have here in my back garden is that the patches of sky i can choose are somewhat limited because there are a lot of trees and my wife won't let me chop them down i know you've got a lot of trees around your house and you live in nottingham which is you know a big city with lots of light but you can still get the job done can you pretty much yeah it is amazing i mean this whole the whole point of this telescope is that it's actually designed to be used in any environment and so actually what it does is it takes a whole series of really short exposures and just keeps adding them up and some of the test data that they did was you know in really brightly lit places where you really couldn't see much of the sky at all and the amazing thing is if you just keep adding the data you know the light from the stars and the galaxies is still there and eventually you can dig it out from the noise of all the city lights they actually did some tests in las vegas for example which is not famous for its lack of lighting and they were able to see you know deep deep sky objects from a parking lot in the middle of las vegas now you're going to take us through some of your images that you've imaged from your backyard in nottingham which i'm very excited about the obvious first one to look at is so called first light can you explain the term first light for people who aren't astronomers and what what that emotes it's it's it's the magic moment and you know in my case well actually i had a fair while to wait for this telescope but it is that magic moment where you spent years and years building a telescope or building an instrument and you finally get to point it to the sky and see if it actually works and so the first light image usually you pick something sort of reasonably dull and straightforward and fairly bright just because you don't want to stress things too much at the outset and you want to find out what the problems might be with with your setup but yeah that first light image where you first point the telescope at the sky and take a picture and hope you get something and in this case i did what did what do what did you choose for first light and why okay so messier 34 very ordinary open cluster about a little over a thousand light years away 100 million years old so it's not a particularly exciting object partly i want to pick it because it's stars and actually one of the things you want to check with the telescope when you first set it up is whether it's focused or not so you want to see how sharp point like the individual stars are in it really i picked it because actually this telescope is sufficiently smart that if you just say what's a good object to look at at the moment it'll tell you and messier 34 was what the telescope picked for me okay and you're happy with the picture it looks pretty good for a first first attempt if you ask me it's pretty good yeah it's a pretty sharp image it's you know it wasn't quite in focus i've since figured out how to better how to focus the telescope but it's a nice nice picture you know lots of stars there definitely a cluster and it proves that it is amazing right this telescope you just basically you take it out you plunk it down on the ground the only thing you have to do is make sure it's level but beyond that it basically figures everything out so it it uses your phone to tell it you know where you are in the world so it knows roughly on what the time is so it knows all that stuff but then you just pointed it in some random direction it takes a picture it figures out from the pattern of stars as it sees what direction it was pointed in and at that point it'll take you anywhere else in the sky and so part of this was just testing does that really work and it turns out it does you say go to messier 34 and you know 10 seconds later there it is is that taking away some of the pleasure or the skill for you like what's what's left to what's your role now i i get to pick what i want to look at as i said it's the you know the stuff that i'm really not very good at is that setting telescopes up making sure everything's aligned with everything else finding things in the sky all that stuff has gone away now and i just get the pleasure of looking at things in the sky what have we got next we've got comet c2019y4 this was just something that was sort of timely in that it was a comment that there was an announcement that there was this comet had come along that potentially might be quite bright subsequently it's actually turned out to be a bit of a bust in that it's fallen to bits so it's actually fragmented falling apart there was some hope this might be one of those bright comments you can see with the naked eye it's now not going to be but there was quite a lot of interest in it at the time and it's an interesting target to go after because of course comets move relative to all the stars and so you actually have to find its current coordinates and instead of telling the telescope to go to a particular object you actually have to tell it which coordinates to go to so it was a good check to make sure that the telescope could actually pick up things just on the basis of coordinates and sure enough there it was when the telescope swung around to the coordinates that it had at the time that's not that's pretty good any idea how far away that was at the time you imaged it like are we talking like i don't i don't even know where to start how close was it it's coming into the inner solar system at the moment so it'll be a matter of you know and a few astronomical units i would guess i honestly don't know it's orbit was going to take it pretty close to the sun but i don't think it had come that far yet so i think it sort of broke up on its way in if i can find out where it was on the night you imaged it i'll put a little thing on the screen for people at home in retrospect so they'll get an idea next on your list here we have uh m97 which i can i can just make out in the image yeah you might need to do a little bit of work on those images to actually get things to a point where you can see them on the video i guess it is pretty faint um so it's m97 is this thing called the owl nebula so cool because i think maybe it was herschel was the first to observe it and found and drew this sketch of it which he sketched as a little owl for some reason but you can see quite why it's so it's this greenish circle with two dark dots or two dark holes in it uh it's a planetary nebula so it's one of these late stages of a star a bit like the sun which is in the process of blowing itself to bits so it's blown off all its outer layers so the big sort of round fuzzy thing are the outer layers of the star that have been blown out already uh there's a white dwarf star in the middle you can maybe see the little bright dot of the white dwarf in the middle and then the two dark holes are actually where the star is now instead of just blowing everything out symmetrically it's actually blowing things out along the poles of the star so it's evacuated two cavities so those holes are actually uh where it sort of tunneled through the material that it had previously ejected out so it's quite a lot of structure going on there the green coloring blue green coloring is partly down to scattered light from the white dwarf which is very hot in the middle partly down to emission from uh ionized oxygen it's ionized so it's very hot and ionized oxygen produces this sort of characteristic green shade and then maybe you can see in the very outer parts it turns red there's a sort of faint red ring around the outside that's where it's a bit cooler and you're seeing that characteristic red emission which comes from hydrogen gas of course m97 there's also an excellent deep sky video people can watch absolutely as are quite a few things we're going to talk about i think the sun will become a planetary nebula this could be how the sun could lack in 5 billion years time m53 and ngc 505.3 yes two for the price of one two globular clusters actually very close to each other on the sky and actually both are very similar distances away they're two of the more distant ones in the milky way but they're actually at similar distances and in similar direction in fact they're sufficiently close together they were even interacting with each other a little bit so there's some tidal interaction between the two that's been detected so they really are sort of twins in that sense but the interesting thing about them is i probably in one of two of my more careless moments said when you've seen one globular cluster you've seen them all the interesting thing about these two is they're about as different as you can get as globular clusters go so i mean one of them is impressively big and bright and the other is pretty pathetic really there are five times as many stars in the brighter one but actually it looks a lot more impressive than even that factor of five because it's very centrally concentrated so you get this real brightness in the middle um whereas the second one is it is a lot fainter but it's also much more diffuse much more spread out and so it does show that actually even things where globular clusters where everyone sort of thinks they're more all more or less the same they really can be very different from each other you say they're very close on the sky but you've you've used two different images to image them they're not so close they'll appear in one image no i think they're about a degree or so apart a couple of degrees apart and the field of view of the telescope's only about half a degree so you had to move the telescope but not really not very far they really are right next to each other in the sky just looking at the dates you image these uh on the same day as well yeah yeah so once i'd done one it was no trouble at all to go to the other one they're right next to each other and i think i think the exposure times are the same as well so it really is a kind of a fair comparison between them next we have m51 this is a this is a real uh showboat galaxy this one yeah yeah m51 yeah everyone's favorite galaxy it's probably it was one of the early things that i looked at just because it's such a pushy galaxy it's glorious spiral structure the whirlpool galaxy as it's otherwise known being stirred by its companion so little companion that's sort of tidally stirring things around absolutely beautiful galaxy to look at and i was really pleased when i was able to get a decent picture of it to the naked eye is it even is anything visible it's not even a speck is it it's just there's just nothing to the naked eye i think it's too faint yeah i think the only galaxy largest galaxy a decent distance away you can see with an atti is the andromeda galaxy m31 so this one you really needed telescope to see that's not a bad image that one that's starting to get up around kind of what i would you know semi-professional quality until you compare it to a proper professional m51 that's the thing i mean you know i'm really pleased with these pictures but actually the people who do this stuff properly and you know do the so the the telescope i'm using has a little color detector in it so actually it's you know you get your whole color picture all in one go the people who do the job more properly take pictures through different colored filters and then combine them and do use all sorts of fancy software to really extract the maximum from their data i'm doing the easy thing of just having the telescope bung it all together for me and make a quick color picture but yeah i'm pretty chuffed with them it's funny isn't it even though you've done as little as almost you could possibly humanly have done to claim to have made the image you didn't even align the telescope uh there's something about knowing it's your image isn't there it really is it is bizarre yes and you know all credit to the technology it did most of the hard work but i'm still claiming it as mine all right m63 we've got another galaxy i imaged this one just because it's of a nice contrast to m51 in that it is another spiral galaxy it's really rather a pretty spiral galaxy but completely different in character in the m51 is one of these things called a grand design spiral uh n63 uh is what's known as a flocculant spiral galaxy so called because it looks sort of woolly it looks like little tufts of wool it's clearly sort of completely different in appearance to m51 and so there's been an interesting point of contention in astronomy as to what what it is that causes different types of spiral structure and it seems likely that this sort of flocculant spiral structure probably has a rather different origin from the grand design that we saw in messier 51. i'm just looking have we done m63 on deep sky videos yes it was our most recent one yeah in fact you've put this image in it this image is in your video yeah so yes i was just looking i was looking at the website saying it's not there and that's because we've done it so recently i haven't put on the website yet so in fact part of the part of the reason i took the picture was because i knew you were making a video and i thought i might be able to sneak it into the video the sunflower galaxy sunflower galaxy because it looks like those little fine petals you find in a sunflower yeah next ngc 4244 so this isn't in the messier catalog but it's in the new general catalog yeah and you can see it's not as big and impressive and bright as the things in the messier catalog which is why it didn't make it into the messier catalogue because they really had to be things that you could find relatively easily or rather messier or one of his collaborators could find relatively easily but actually part of the reason why it's not so big and bright is because it's exactly edge-on it's a beautiful disc galaxy that we're looking at sideways on and so it doesn't look as impressive because you only get that sort of sideways thin view of it but at some level it is a very impressive thing to look at because it shows quite how thin spiral galaxies really are how when you do get to see the mage on they really are disc like um so this is a sort of some of the first evidence that there was as to what the three-dimensional structure of galaxies really was the fact that you occasionally saw them this thin meant that they had to be really intrinsically very thin discs of stars next we have ic342 what's ic i don't know that one so ic is the index catalog there's the messier catalogue then there was the new general catalog came along with a much bigger catalog of star clusters nebulae and galaxies and then as a sort of supplement to the new general catalog the ngc it was this thing called the ic the index catalog which essentially sort of hoovered up a lot of objects that hadn't been found for the ngc they tend to be smaller and fainter which is why they weren't in the ngc and a lot of them were actually only found when photography started coming into astronomy and people could actually instead of having to observe just with the eye to an eyepiece could actually take pictures and see things that have been too faint to see before and so this particular galaxy for example wasn't found until the 1890s which is surprising because it's actually it's a big galaxy it's a big bright galaxy intrinsically it's almost the same size as the full moon so it would be a big galaxy on the sky but it's very very faint and the reason it's very faint is because it's very close to the plane of the milky way it's only about 10 degrees out of the plane in the milky way and the milky way contains all this stuff that absorbs light so that we're sort of viewing it through all this obscuration that's associated with the dust the material in the plane of the milky way and so only about a quarter of its light actually gets through we lose three quarters of the light from it which is why it looks so pathetic and ghost like in those images it's also why there's so many stars in the images because we're very close to the plane of the milky way so we're starting to pick up more and more of the milky way stars and so the reason why it ends up looking so sort of pathetically faint is because we're viewing it through all this fog of the interstellar dust within the milky way which is sort of making it lose most of the light and so we only see this sort of race-like appearance of a galaxy i think i mean my impression my initial impression which of course you know after thinking for a few seconds i realize is ridiculous but because it's so faint and because there are so many stars in it almost creates this illusion that we're seeing through it and we're seeing stars on the other side of it but of course all the stars you see that are individual stars are well and truly in the foreground very definitely yeah yeah and actually part of the interesting thing is that we're not really seeing through things at all right the the reason why things appear so faint is because we're not seen through the milky way and so although we tend to think of galaxies as transparent that you can see things behind them this is telling us that that's not quite the whole story that actually there is quite a lot of obscuration in the galaxy which prevents you from seeing things behind them we're almost lucky the earth is as far flung as it is the good news is that the dust in the milky way is in a pretty thin plane which means that the number of directions where we end up looking through a lot of it is there's not very many right because most directions you can look in you're kind of looking out through it and so you're not looking through much of it you have to be pretty unlucky to be looking right in the plane of the galaxy so so it does mean there are lots of directions we can look in but there are some places where you really can't see very much just because the observation is that that intense mike that obscuring dust that is sits along the plane of the milky way how far out does it reach from the center like are we in it are we sitting in that dust or does it get more diffuse out as you get further out into the disk so it does get more diffused there is still some there basically wherever there are stars you end up with dust because the star the dust comes from stars some of the late stages of stellar burning are kind of not they're not smokeless effectively so they just put out lots of this material and so actually wherever there are stars you'll end up finding dust so stars are big polluters for all this talk about how clean solar energy is they really well most of their lives they're pretty well behaved but as i say in some of those later stages where they're sort of throwing off a lot of their outer layers of gas and cooling down a lot that's where you tend to get dust grains forming so in those late stages you end up throwing a lot of dust out into the galaxy okay next we have ngc yeah i took i mean this is no one's particular favorite galaxy i took a picture of it because it's one that i happen to have written a paper about or he's been one of the authors on the paper about this galaxy it's a splunky looking galaxy thing called an irregular galaxy it's a pretty close cousin to the large magellanic cloud so those from the southern hemisphere are very familiar with the large magellanic cloud as one of the galaxies you can see with the naked eye is pretty similar to it in that like the large magellanic cloud it has a bar-like structure in it it's a disc galaxy but it's very messy it's not as tidy as the spiral galaxies it's quite a bit further away so it's quite a lot harder to see but the interesting difference between it and the large magellanic cloud is it that this galaxy is producing an awful lot of stars it's almost a starburst galaxy it's producing an intense burst of stars right now or at least in the in the recent past and one of the unanswered questions until a couple of years ago was why why is this galaxy producing stars so vigorously and what we were able to do by taking a really deep image so this was an 18-hour exposure with a half meter telescope so still by astronomical standards a relatively small telescope half meter telescope as a smallish telescope but by looking at this patch of sky for 18 hours we've got a very deep image and we're able to see that this galaxy actually has a companion that is ripped to pieces so it's clearly had a close encounter with an even smaller galaxy this is quite a small galaxy to start with but it's had a close encounter with an even smaller galaxy and the net effect of that is it ended up ripping the other galaxy to pieces but also triggering a big burst of style formation in this galaxy what was it like imaging this one like for old time's sake and because of a personal connection and seeing this splodge like all the other ones but but having all this extra knowledge about it and not this like this relationship with that you form under the fire of writing a paper about it so that was really nice but actually the other interesting thing and the sort of the warm glow i got from looking at this one is most of the other galaxies i've looked at are very sort of they're the standard galaxies that everyone looks at right and so actually there are lots and lots of images of them at some level my images don't really stack up to the beautiful ones that some people end up making and i don't feel like i'm doing anything you know lots of people have trodden that path before the nice thing about this galaxy is not that many people bother to look at it and so it's nice to look at a galaxy which is you know is one of those in one of those little nooks and crannies that most people don't bother to explore in astronomy i feel like you've got off the beaten track a bit yeah absolutely and and as you said it's kind of nice to look at a galaxy where i think you know i know something interesting about this galaxy and so i do you do feel that sort of connection to it as well yeah last but not least virgo cluster m87 and ngc four double five zero so yeah the so our nearest sort of brightest cluster of galaxies is one which i can just about get to through a gap in the trees so i had to go at looking at it and it's big enough on the sky you you don't get to see the whole cluster at once but you can start picking out some of the galaxies from it and so one of the really famous galaxies in this cluster is messier 87 m87 it's sort of right near the middle of the cluster it's a big bright galaxy what it's most famous for at the moment is that it's where that image the first image of a black hole came from remember the black hole telescope took an image of it and actually you can just about see one of the consequences of that black hole in this image it's quite hard to pick out but if you look at about sort of two o'clock in that image there's a sort of little bit of an extension in the light it's not quite round and what you're picking out there is a hint of the jet so there's a jet of material being flung out from that black hole the immediate vicinity of that black hole and in a very well collimated way and so m87 famously has this jet it's actually quite hard to see so i was really pleased when even with this little four and a half inch telescope you could actually start seeing some hints of the jet coming out of the middle of m87 yeah it's almost like that's an eyeball and that's where like the front of the eye is or something like that it just looks a little bit distorted doesn't it you can just see that it's not quite round there's something going on in that direction and that really is just a hint of that jetta material getting flung out an ngc 4550 is also there you included that that's another one that i haven't have a little bit of a personal connection to it doesn't look like a particularly exciting galaxy it's one of these s0 galaxies so it's a disc galaxy but without much by way of spiral structure or anything it's pretty much edge on what it's famous for is that in the 1990s vera rubin took a look at it studied the light split the light from this galaxy up into spectra and found by studying the doppler shifts in the light from that spectra that this galaxy is a bit strange in that it's not rotating either clockwise or anti-clockwise it's actually got half the stars going around one way and half the stars going around the other way so it's a real oddity somehow this galaxy formed with with the stars going around in this sort of two directions at the same time and there are lots of ideas and theories about how it might have formed and there were some people were saying well maybe the two disks form simultaneously and they do look pretty much identical certainly from the analysis that vera rubin and her collaborators did they said that they look pretty much the same as each other the the bit that we were able to add is that a few years ago with rather better data 10 15 years later that we could get we were able to show that actually by studying the light in great detail the two sets of stars are not the same one is quite a bit younger than the other so actually what happened is one disc form rotating one way then the whole load of gas fell in rotating the other way and formed another disk of stars going around the other way so this uh this period of backyard astronomy you've been doing uh do you think it's been good for you like has it has it has it has it like changed the way you think in any way as a professional astronomer or is it just something you did or like what are you what are you taking from it i'm enjoying it fundamentally no and it's hard enough at the moment to find things to enjoy right so it's actually nice to have something new to try out to play around with to enjoy doing so i've enjoyed taking the pictures and thinking about them a bit and talking about them and you know i've been putting them out on twitter and chatting about them so it's an opportunity for a bit better outreach in astronomy and it's you know you're at some level it is nice to actually you know instead of just looking at the pretty pictures that the hubble space telescope's taken you know it's nice to look at your own pictures and then they're not as good as double space telescopes pictures but that's okay because i made them and it's just you do get a definite sense of satisfaction just making the pictures yourself you're a good salesman mike i want one of those telescopes now i bought i bought a manual one a few years ago and i never saw a single thing through it because i just couldn't line it up or get it to work and i just put it in storage after a few frustrated nights so that that's why i never bought a telescope like that i know i would have done exactly the same thing yeah all right well thanks for your time my pleasure i look forward to more pictures i look forward to taking them i'll follow you on twitter to make sure i see them all mike the sun's can you see your video picture or not because the sun's coming to a point where it's half on your face and half knot you've got a towel sorry a towel all right let's see what we can do yeah that's the right idea it's too small oh yeah if it doesn't fall down on me head halfway through the recording yeah i don't think the sun's going to get into a position which makes it bad again it's a nice soft light now very well done okay so let me just set myself back up roughly where i was before this is locked down uh youtubing people yeah absolutely

Channel: Sixty Symbols

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Keywords: sixtysymbols

Id: glOWZoFnB8w

Length: 25min 52sec (1552 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/drgigg]

Please don't promote the scam that eVscope is!

If you need help on how to manage a telescope, maybe thunderf00t would be happy to help you?

​

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyG9kbJo2sg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKLMsTOuK9c

[u/daftlycurious]

Why does the video flicker during transitions?