from Iceland with Daniel. Oh, hello. Hello, say hi, Eve. Say hi.  If you remind your, if anybody's watching the stream of it, just make sure you have your audio turned off on that computer. It's a common mistake. Even with myself. Good reminder, I was just doing that. Almost the top of the hour. Shall we kick off the kickoff party? Yeah, we're streaming live right now. Hi, everyone. And our mics are hot. Scott, are we going to begin with Debbie Waltzang or shall we jump right into some introductions? Completely up to you guys. Well, I know we're gonna get to hear some more Debbie Waltzang later. So why don't we get started with our party? Okay. Welcome, welcome, welcome. And Scott, I'll hand it off to you to kick us off. Okay, all right. So I will take us to our wind sink trim. And here we are. And here we are. We have started officially the global moon party and the kickoff for the International Observe, the Moon Night. So with us, I'm just part of a team of wonderful individuals. We started out this idea with Vivian White at Night Sky Network. And she has invited on just an amazing group of support people and speakers and presenters from all over the country, I think from different parts of the world as well. I think all the way out to Iceland, which is totally cool. And so, you know, later in the program, we even have Amy Kaminski, Senior Policy Advisor for the Office of the Chief Sciences at NASA. So that's, it doesn't get any cooler than that. Why don't you take it away, Vivian and Kayla? Thank you, Scott. I am so excited to kick off the International Observe, the Moon Night season with this global star party. Scott has been amazing at Explorer Alliance, helping us to coordinate all of the, herd all the cats. He's an expert cat herder. Thank you so much, Scott. It's really lovely to be here and thanks for being the man behind the curtain, figuring all of the things out. That's totally my pleasure. I am Vivian White. I work at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in San Francisco, California, where I am thrilled to be able to work on the NASA Night Sky Network. I've got my colleague, Dave Prosper here with me, who is running quite a few of things behind the scenes too. Thanks, Dave. And I wanna introduce the other host of this evening, Kayla Berry. She works at NASA Goddard and has just been an amazing coordinator of getting this all together. So we're really excited to kick off the International Observe, the Moon Night, we'll say week. Kayla, welcome. Thank you, Vivian. Thank you, Scott. And hello, everyone. We are so excited to be here with you. My name is Kayla Berry and I work in the Solar System Exploration Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. I am also the host and observer liaison for International Observe, the Moon Night, which is a worldwide public engagement event that happens every year in just a few moments. The director of the program, Andrea Jones, is going to tell you all about it. But before we get there, I would just like to provide a quick peek at some of the exciting things that are coming our way tonight. Our first hour of the program is going to focus on all the ways that you can get involved with International Observe, the Moon Night, pro tips, resources, activities. We are here to welcome you, help you figure it out and welcome your ideas if you're someone who has done this before. In the second hour of our program, we are going to focus on citizen science and education resources. So we will hear from, as Scott mentioned, Amy Kaminski, who is part of the Artemis Prizes, Challenges and Crowdsourcing program. We will get to hear from special guests at SLU about some educational resources that are available through their program. From our colleagues at the Lunar and Planetary Institute, we have an awesome hands-on activity demonstration for you. And we're also very excited to welcome Brandon Rodriguez from JPL Education with an additional activity demonstration. And we're going to kick off that hour with a citizen science program. So if you are interested in getting involved with the science that NASA does, tune in, that's for you. We're really excited to share some opportunities there. Our last hour is going to go over perspectives from a few different NASA folks. In addition to the ones that you'll hear from earlier in the program, we'll get a moon in review, recent and upcoming winter news with C.C.T. Deacon. We'll get to hear from Ernie Wright, who is a data visualizer at NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. We'll see a couple of really cool ways to tour the moon virtually that you can do at home on your own. And we'll get to hear from the person behind the Astronomy Picture of the Day series, which has been a favorite of mine for a long time. And I'm so pleased that we get to hear from Robert later today throughout the program. We are very, very excited to be able to bring you some musical offerings from the Quintet Wind Sync and others. And that's just a quick preview of some of the things that are coming our way this evening. So with that, I'll kick it back to Vivian and Scott for any more words before we jump in. I am just reading through some of the comments on YouTube and I was gonna say, please let us know where you're joining from. I know we have people from all over the globe for this Global Moon Party. So it's really lovely to just know that you're out there and tuning in. Yeah, and from us at Explorer Alliance, it's just really great to be a part of it and to be the guys that are connecting the wires to run this. I'm just as excited as all of you guys are in watching these amazing presenters. So thank you. Thank you, Scott. All right, let's kick it off. We have with us to start the evening one of International Observer of the Moon Nights founding members and now the public engagement lead who is running International Observer of the Moon Nights with an incredible team of people who many of whom you'll meet tonight. I wanna introduce Andrea Jones, who's gonna share with us some more about International Observer of the Moon Nights. She is a scientist at NASA Goddard and works with, oops, just as I got it together, works at the Solar System Exploration Division. So Andrea, welcome, we love to hear from you and hear all about your experience with the International Observer of the Moon Nights because you have been doing this for quite a while. I have, but it is so wonderful to be here with all of you and I, oops, I think I'm sharing. Hold on, I think it messed up what's going on. Um, let's see, is this, ah, okay, this, are you seeing something? Yes. Excellent, okay. I was hoping you'd be. It looks better. Okay, good, good. That's the best, right there. Excellent, all right, well, thank you so much and thank you all for being here. Thank you so much to Vivian and Kayla and Scott and the whole Nights Sky Network and the whole team that's putting this together and to all of our presenters for being here and to all of you for joining us this evening or this morning or whatever time it is where you are. But this is our first Global Moon Party that we've ever done. We've been doing this event for a long time now and I'll tell you a little bit about it, but I'm really, really happy to be part of this first Global Moon Party and to be here with all of you as we are trying out something new. It's always fun to have a new thing together, but as we're getting underway here, let's see if I can change. Aha, okay. So for those of you who are not familiar with our program, International Observes of the Moon Night is a worldwide celebration of lunar science, exploration, celestial observation and our personal and cultural connections to the moon. So you can see a few ways how people are participating here, but really it's one day each year that we invite everyone on Earth to go out, look at the moon, observe the moon, celebrate the moon together. And though I said one day, it's really a series of days. So as Vivian said, we do have one official date and this year the official date is October 16th, but we have a window because we know that date doesn't work for everyone, just like it didn't for this particular party. So this year from October 8th until the 24th, we are celebrating the moon in lots of different ways. Some people are having virtual events like this one, others are in-person, there's maybe a few less of those right now during our global pandemic and places where you can gather safely, that's another choice. So there's lots of resources that we have on our website on moon.nasa.gov slash observe and we want people to take those materials, take the inspiration to go out, look at the moon and learn about the moon and then make it your own. So depending on your interests, perhaps you work in a museum, a science center with a classroom and you wanna have an event, that's great. We want you to tailor it for your own audience and the resources that you have available or maybe you wanna observe the moon at home with your family or with your friends or as an individual lunar observer and we think all of that is wonderful and just want everyone to go out and have a wonderful meaningful experience for them with the moon and we try to provide a lot of resources on our website to do that. So let's see. All right, so this event or this program was inspired by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and our twin or our sister spacecraft, the Lunar Crater Observing and Sensing Satellite. Back in 2009, we had a big event at NASA Goddard in Maryland and at NASA Ames in California, celebrating, we're at the moon, we have these big, we're at the moon parties and people seem to like them. And so we thought, hey, we can keep this up. And so we kept having events to invite everyone in the world to actually, we started a lot smaller. We started thinking just our local communities and we thought national and we never did that because right away people around the world expressed interest in doing this with us. And so we've kept it up since then but the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been with us the entire time. This is a spacecraft that's still at the moon today and is helping really reshape our understanding of our nearest neighbor in space. So here I'm showing a few of our data sets. We have all the way on the left, the near side and far side visible imagery with our cameras. The middle is showing you the topography of the surface which we actually know better than the topography of the earth or any other large planet. We actually know the shape of Bennu better than the moon now, but Bennu is a little bit smaller. And then we also monitor the temperatures of the lunar day and the lunar night and during lunar eclipses to see how the surface changes and understand some of the physical and chemical properties of the surface with temperature as well. And also help prepare for going back to the moon and what kind of temperature environment, what kind of radiation environment, what kind of impact cratering rate are we seeing so that we can protect our equipment and our astronauts when we return there. And the bottom images are one of those new impact craters which I just think is so beautiful. We're watching the moon change before our eyes and it's gorgeous, it's dazzling and this is a process that happens throughout the solar system on every solid body and beyond as well. So we're learning about that as well as admiring it. The middle image is really just because I think it's gorgeous. It's a sunrise or sunset for which one over the northern pole of the moon which is just stunning. And we're gonna have views like this at the South Pole as well. And Ernie Wright later will show you some of our great imagery and really the visualizations of what we're preparing that our astronauts will see at the South Pole. And over on the right, I include that because we've been to the moon but there are still so many mysteries about the moon. So this is a crazy feature called INA-D that we don't really understand what it is yet. It might be evidence of recent volcanism on the moon, a volcanism type that we do have on the earth but we really need to learn more about all of these features. The moon still has many, many secrets that we would love to learn more about. All right, so some other things about our event. So International Observer of the Moon night takes place every year in September or October on a Saturday. Always the official event date but again, we have a date range to be more flexible for everyone's schedules out there. And it's always a round first quarter. This is kind of a late phase for us. It's a little more in the gibbous phase than we normally have it. But this was just a great time to look at the moon. When you see that line between day and night, you're seeing the terminator and the terminator is a great place to look at the rugged topography of the moon. The cratered landscape really pops out. When you see that line between day and night, so that's why we don't normally do a full moon even though we encourage you to go out anytime you can possibly see the moon but we specifically pick a phase where you can see that terminator and then can look through telescopes if you have any available or binoculars. And that's a really, really nice place to look at the moon. And each year also, Brian Day from NASA Ames who's on our team makes moon maps for us. So it used to be one moon map. Now he's gone above and beyond and we have several moon maps. We have three different ones this year made for Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere. And if you go to our website on moon.nasa.gov slash observe under the resources you can find this. And each one of these features, he picks new ones every year and then describes them for you and he always picks them along the terminator. So in case you get to look through a telescope or binoculars or even just with your naked eye, there are some really, really neat features to look for. And this year he also made video flyovers in moon trek for each of these sites. So you can take a look at those and some will be later on in the broadcast as well. All right, so let me step ahead here. Okay, so International Zeroth Moonlight is a great time to talk about lunar science and exploration and what's been going on in the past year with lunar science. So Stacy Tidick and my colleague is going to be talking with you later about a lot of different things that have been going on this past year in lunar science. So I won't go into great detail here, but some sneak peeks of what you might talk about are sunlight or on the moon. We thought that was a dry place. Turns out you can actually get little, little bits of water even on the sunlit surfaces of the moon, which is really, really incredible. We also found some great places potentially to look for samples if we go collect rock samples on the moon again, where can we find some that will tell us about the deep interior or at least deeper in the mantle than we get on most parts of the crust to learn about what the interior of the moon is like. So this was another release this past year. And then we're also doing some field work here on Earth to learn about how to explore the moon, how to prepare to safely explore the moon in areas of rich scientific interest and keep our astronauts safe, keep our equipment safe and really get the best science out of our expeditions to the moon and beyond. And our next speaker is from Iceland. I had the great pleasure to go there not too long ago and learn about how we're doing some of these preparations as well. And we're gonna feature this on our NASA Expeditions Twitter account the week after International Observing Moonlight, if anyone's interested. But there's many more scientific advances to talk about and some of these are collected in a slide deck that Stacey Teidekan also is gonna post to our website. So I hope you turn in for her talk and I also hope that you check out our website for more information. All right. I wanted to share just a few more things with you about our event. So, I think I'm flipping ahead here. So in addition to celebrating lunar science and exploration, this is also a great time to be celebrating the moon in our culture, our personal connections to the moon and the moon in arts as well. So we have a lot of different ways to observe the moon. We love different cultural stories. Some of them will be featured in this broadcast as well. But we really encourage people to observe in creative ways. So you can touch the moon. We have some 3D prints there. We of course have images from spacecrafts. You can go outside and look at it. You can also make moon art. You can take pictures of the moon. You can share them with us on social media if you have a fun way that you're observing the moon. Show us what you're doing. Share that with the world. And you can do that through all kinds of social media channels. And we link to those on our website or observe the moon on any social media platform. And you can share that with the world. And with us, we'd love to see how you are observing the moon. So last year, this is our map of participation in the middle there. So this is an event where hundreds of thousands of people get together each year to observe the moon, to learn about the moon, to celebrate the moon.  So we're so glad that you're here to learn about the moon with us. And you can see lots of different ways again that people have been participating. So we've been updating our website. We're providing new resources and graphics. We encourage you to observe in groups where you can or observe outside and all on your own or with your family, friends. I really like the moon because this time when I am distance from a lot of my friends and family, we're all able to look at the same moon together. So I think that's really, really special. And you can find this and a lot more on our website. So thank you so much for being here. Thanks again to our organizers and our hosts. And I'm really, really looking forward to having a great night here with you all. So thank you so much. All right, thank you, Andrea, for that introduction to International Observe the Moon Night. As Andrea mentioned, our next guests are calling in all the way from Iceland. And I want to extend a huge, huge thank you to our next three guests who are all calling in from Timestones where it is very late at night. So without any further delay, I'd like to welcome Daniel Lieb from the Iceland Space Agency and Austis Sifgunar's daughter, a poet from Iceland who are going to deliver our next presentations. Thank you so much, Kayla, Vivian, Andrea. It's a real pleasure to be here. We're honored to join all of you. I'm here in Lunar Habitat Reykjavík. The habitat I'm actually sitting in was designed by students at the Rhode Island School of Design under the leadership of Professor Michael Lai who we've been working with here at the Iceland Space Agency. And this specific habitat was designed for the Lunar South Pole. So I thought it would be apropos to join from mid-deck here. But without further ado, I'd like to introduce our very special guest here, Austis Sif, who is a poet and video artist here in Iceland and working all over the globe. And she's put together a very special Lunar poem for us tonight. So without further ado, Austis Sif. For our special guest today is the most important and most important in the history of the water, the life of the queen and the queen of Eveborg, one writer, Fjallanum Ammars. For the beauty, for the beautiful blue moon. The water here is crystal clear frau hinnum endellusus kukkum söydurpols tungsits. You reflect the sun gazing at us from the skies. We read into you. We look at you as a signal. When the moon is full we can feel it. It has a direct effect on us, our feelings. High tide, low tide. The water. You are our cosmic clock. Are, where and will be. In the search for water a lady steps onto the lunar surface. One step closer to the Martian hills to explore and reflect the blue light of home. Tunglith, to end the speckle of the sun. We hear the sound from the sky. We read into you. We hear you as a signal. When the moon is full we can feel the sound. It has a direct effect on us, our feelings. High tide, low tide. The water. You are our cosmic clock. Are, where and will be. In the search for water a lady steps onto the lunar surface. One step closer to the Martian hills to explore and reflect the blue light. We hear the sound from the sky. Thank you. Thank you, Austis. It was really a pleasure to hear that. That's the first time I've heard the poem all the way through. Austis actually has been composing these words for the last few days, a few weeks. So thank you. And Til Haamingu, congratulations to everyone for this incredible kickoff event. Here in Iceland, many of you may know that, in fact, at the beginning of the Space Age, the original Apollo astronauts came here to Iceland to train for their eventual landing at Tranquility Base. They came here in 1965 and 1967 for geology training missions. And since then, researchers from NASA have continued to come to Iceland with great frequency. And now with Artemis, the importance of Iceland is that much more. Both Martian research, analog research, is being done here in Iceland and has been for the last couple of years. And now with the return to the moon, astronaut training will resume here in Iceland once more. And just this past summer, we were field testing the MS-2 Moon Mars analog space simulator. And we have some very special footage that's never been seen before that I'd like to share with you. And I'll be talking over it. There's no audio to the video. But this was captured just this past August. And there were actually three separate teams all in Iceland this summer, all doing separate research. But I think it emphasizes the importance of Iceland for the future of space exploration. And we're just really excited to be here and be able to offer logistical support, research support for the Artemis program. And without further ado, I'd like to show you some video documentation of our field testing of the MS-2. And Scott, it's from here we go. Thank you. So this material here was taken in the Highlands. The original Apollo training missions were all done north of Batnioka Glacier around the volcano Oskia. This is actually further south in the Highlands, central south highlands specifically. And here we can see one of our analog astronauts, Alex, who's an experienced royal military aviator actually, who was field testing the MS-2. And the goal of this project is to basically develop the most the spacesuit simulator, the highest fidelity, so that we can do training here on Earth that can give us the confidence and also the data necessary to understand what's necessary for the future of spacesuits for the Artemis mission. And the specific geometry that we're looking at here with the MS-2 came from Johnson Space Center and Artemis Generation XEMU spacesuits. But this spacesuit simulator specifically is designed for analog research. So it's not pressurized. And it's designed to simulate as close as possible what a spacesuit would feel like on the Moon or Mars, but here on Earth. And so here we visited a number of both lunar and Martian terrains. Here you can see Alex trekking about on basaltic sands. And here we're inside of a lava tube. The importance of lava tubes is significance for space exploration, is that of course on the lunar surface, we don't have a magnetosphere to protect us from solar radiation. So it's important to find shelters that can shield us from the dangerous solar radiation, cosmic radiation. And it's believed that there are lava tubes on both the Moon and Mars and that these lava tubes will potentially be a place for habitation that can shield astronauts from these harmful rays. And here you we have Matt Pryor, who was leading the analog endeavor for us. And he's exiting the lava tube Stefan Tepler. And once again, of course, we all understand that Artemis is all about going back to the Moon to stay and using it as a foothold to eventually go onwards to Mars. And here in Iceland, we have all of these terrestrial analogs in very close proximity to one another. And I think you could see clearly that if you want to eventually go back to the Moon and onwards to Mars, you really should come to Iceland first. So with that, I'm going to return this back to our panel. It's a real honor to be here. And if any of you have any questions, I'm happy to do my best to answer them. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Daniel and Austi Sif for celebrating International Observe the Moon Night with us and for the gift of your poetry and for this exciting science update. For now, I'd like to invite John Luca Massi to join us just to stay with our schedule. But folks, if you have questions, please do feel free to add them in the chat and we will do our best to get answers back to you as we are able. Our next guest, thank you so much again, Daniel and Austi Sif. Our next guest is John Luca Massi, who is a longtime international Observe the Moon Night supporter and a truly inspirational night sky and evening and dawn sky photographer. John Luca, over to you. Thank you very much, Kaila, for organizing this with the other colleagues. It is such a pleasure and privilege to be here tonight because here in Italy, we are in the middle of the night, but it is cloudy, so no stars tonight, unfortunately. But earlier this evening, I could spot the moon and it was funny because we were going to talk about our beautiful satellite. And as you told, I have been loving the International Observe the Moon Night since the very beginning. And I really believe that celebrating the moon is a great idea, not only for the science and there is a lot of exciting science, of course, under the name of the moon, but because the moon is bringing us a lot of other meanings because it is so much celebrated in any culture. Here in Italy, I am speaking from Rome, we have plenty of references in our culture to the moon. I can tell about many poems, many songs, many hearts in general. So it is such a beautiful cosmic object and it is bringing us so many inspirations. And as an astronomer, I started my interest in the field, looking at the moon, of course, and I was attracted by this changing face night after night. And this was bringing to me the idea that there was a rhythm in the sky, that is the moon orbiting around us. And as Andrea reminded us, looking at the terminator of the moon every night was a joy and a discovery for me. And now I try to bring the same excitement to the other people when I have the opportunity to meet them and to talk about the moon, about our natural satellite and the nice sky in general. But the moon is really a winning object. I have seen many people crying, looking through a telescope when they look at the moon. And this is something I cannot describe by words. This is why, from time to time, I try to take images of our natural satellite, our cosmic neckboard, how I love to call our moon. But taking images of the moon can be very easy or very hard, depending on what you really want to do. And we have now smartphones around that they can take some very nice pictures of the moon and you also have very nice telescopes. Even amateur people have a very nice telescope they can use to grab so beautiful images that they can be used for scientific purposes, of course. But I want to share with you a few images I did here in Rome where I live, because at some point in my life I discovered the beauty to put together the beauty of the moon and the beauty of the place where I live. And of course, this is true for everyone. I am in Rome, but you are in your own town, your own country, and discovering this connection under the name of the beauty can be very nice, especially on the international observable night. And I want to try to share with you a few of these sites and I hope that you can see them. And very likely you can even recognize a few monuments in Rome. And I particularly love to image the full moon. Yes, I know people with the experience with the moon know that observing the full moon is not the best when you really want to see details because you basically have no shadows, no contrast, but looking at the moon from the city when the moon is full is a true experience. And here it is, for example, the full moon rising above Rome with some monuments from the city.  And for me, this is amazing. This is why I really love to go out there to find a place in the city from where I can see the moon showing just behind that monument, that monument, for example. And here it is the very famous Colosseum. And again, here you have the full moon rising just behind the Colosseum. And I cannot tell the emotion. I can really enjoy, I can experiment while I am facing this personally. And I really hope that this image is able to bring to you the same feelings, the same experience. And again, this is the Colosseum on the left with a sequence showing one of the best and the most beautiful lunar eclipses I could observe in 2018, so a few years ago. And I could share this life feed, this life view, sorry, at the time we were not handling with the pandemic with literally thousands of people. And it was something truly, truly magic. And again, this is the full moon rising behind the Colosseum as well. You understand that I love this monument and it is a symbol of the city, of course. This is for me seeing the sky I love together with the city I love is a really, really a new experience. And this is really motivating this part of my photographic work and this public outreach activity because I invite people to try the same. So go there, just wait for the moon rising or setting or just wait for the moon and try to put together the city, the place where you live and the sky you love. This is something I really ask people to try and I'm sure you will love the experience. And of course, not only the full moon, even tonight for example, there was such a sharp crescent of the moon. You can see here the St. Peter dome and on the left, our beautiful satellite. I'm really amazed that every time it is like the first time no matter I forgot how many years ago I started observing the nice sky, but the moon for me is always as the first time because I cannot tell the magic. Of course, I am a scientist, but my heart and my soul are the first things to enjoy the experience. Then my mind is asked to come into play, but the first reaction is in the name of the beauty. We are sharing, we are seeing together. And again, this is a full moon setting down and again here you can see the St. Peter dome and you here had a very peculiar eclipse as you can see. And I had to wait for years for this exact alignment because it is not obvious to have this kind of things. And this experience looking at the moon from the city is also training you to wait for the right moment. This is something you can use in your personal life at some point very likely. And again, the full moon above the great synagogue in Rome are down and I really love these kind of combinations. I really hope that these images will tell you the same that I feel while I am alone early in the morning or somewhere at sunset just waiting for those things to happen. And here again the St. Peter Basilica at sunset with amazing colors with the moon and the earth shine making possible for us to guess the entire lunar disk. And by the way, it was Leonardo da Vinci more than five centuries ago to try to explain the origin of the earth shine. And it was relatively right considering it was five centuries ago. And you can try I invite you to see to read what Leonardo wrote about the origin of this elegant, simple but so elegant effect you can see on the moon when it is so young. And again, the city, yeah, I cannot tell you how many monuments are here. It will take a lot of time but trust me, they are, I mean, there is Rome with its most famous and important monuments just enjoying the moon rising above it. And here of course there is also the local observatory with the very young moon setting and between the moon and the observatory there is a dot or light. It is a planet Mars. So it is quite a nice image because we have been on the moon, we are going there again, but we are also hoping to visit Mars pretty soon. And I hope that this image will, it is like, like to say good luck to those taking the way to Mars. And this is from last spring. This is one of the images I really love more. And this is, as you can see, I prefer to work with my photographic equipment. I never use, I didn't use telescopes for this kind of images. This is typical photographic equipment. And I prefer to work at sunset or at dawn when I imagine the full moon because you still have some light surviving around the environment. So you can enjoy both your local place and the moon rising or setting. This is why I really prefer to work at those very precise moments of the day of the day. And again, I really can observe, I can stare at these events and these amazing shows for hours. Unfortunately, the earth is rotating, you know, so at some point the moon will set and the show is over. Otherwise, very likely I could stay there for the eternity because, you know, you understand because we share the same passion for the nice sky and for the moon, of course. And this is one of the last images I want to share. And this is from last August. And I'm particularly proud here because you have the full moon rising again. You have the Italian flag and the flag is just above the building where our president is living. So there is the Italian Republic in this image together with the moon. And I was very happy. I have been trying to take this image for a few years because there is a very narrow window for me to have this alignment. And the past years I had clouds, of course. Murphy is always in action, as you know, my friends. And just to give you an idea of what a very simple photographic equipment can do, you can also image craters without having telescopes. This has been done with the 400 millimeters lens. Nothing special, but you can see many features. Not very different from the face we will have next week when we will celebrate the International Observer, the Moon Night. And the last image, again, from the moon. And as I told you, looking at the moon has a lot of meanings because it is bringing to you the science, but it is also bringing to you the dreams of many, many other people many, many years before us. And they have been looking at the same moon and they have tried to explain what they were seeing and where that was hard, there was always poetry, as we have listed earlier, able to tell us something very beautiful about the moon. And I hope that these images will be able to hopefully invite you to enjoy the upcoming International Observer, the Moon Night, because for me it is such a very special opportunity. And I will do my best here in Italy to bring the moon to everyone. And again, I thank all of you for the opportunity to share with you my experience, my sentiments and my love for our cosmic network, our beautiful moon. Thank you very much. Oh, that was so beautiful, Jean-Lucca. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you so much, Vivian. Incredible images and such passion. I think you've inspired everyone watching. Thank you. Thank you to you. I wanted to mention, too, that we put in the chat links to some observing guides for photographing the moon. And I think that if anyone wants to try that, there are some simple ways to do that, either with a cell phone or a real camera or with a small telescope. There are lots of great options there. We encourage you all to be inspired and try that out yourself. Thank you so much. And I'm very happy, again, to thank you for creating this and for the opportunity. Thank you so much. Thank you, Jean-Lucca. All right. Feel free to put questions in the chat and we're happy to take those at the end. I think we'll have some time left over with any luck. I would love to introduce our next speaker, who is a friend of mine. I am happy to say from Oklahoma City Astronomy Club, we've got Eileen Grubowski joining us. And Eileen and her team at the Oklahoma City Astronomy Club have been doing amazing lunar outreach for Observe the Moon Night. And her pictures are just, they inspire me as well. And I wanted to share those with you through Eileen. She is, wears many hats. She ran the Norman North High School Astronomy Club for many years. And she right now is also teaching at the Girl Scout Astronomy Club of Western Oklahoma. I think she's running that. So with all your hats, Eileen, I would love to hear from you and how you've been observing the Moon for the past few years with International Observe the Moon Night. And you've done a really great job of helping us to think of ways to do that more safely. And I would love to hear you share that with everyone else. Thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you very much. Should I just hit the share screen button? Sure, yeah. Okay, let's see if I can get there. Somehow I am not seeing the host to spotlight a dear video. No, probably do that from here too if it's easier. Okay, that may be the best way. And stuff. If you can bring it up from there, it probably would be easier. Got it. It's giving me all sorts of weird. I'm at the Girl Scout Camp Travira right now. We're about to run a special STEM night for the girls in astronomy. We're introducing the EV Scope. The Girl Scout Astronomy Club is getting ready for Observe the Moon Night. So they're running a lunar station and all that good stuff. So is it coming up? It is one second. Okay. All right. That's great. Thank you. As Vivian said, I wear a lot of hats and they keep asking me to be an officer for OKC and do things. And I said, no, not at this time. You know, I'm very busy. I'm just taking care of just getting retired. So could you go to the next slide, Vivian? And see if you can. Oh, yeah, because you're going to have to advance it. We've been at Norman North. We started experimenting with Mr. Pete Core, who is a parent member. He's a good electrical engineer. And he is also a very active amateur astronomer in all these groups. And so he and I have sponsored the kids. We do outreach to our local schools and we evolved a system. He has a little 6M camera and a six inch telescope. And we project the moon on the ground and the kids get to dance to it. So in October 2018, we took our show on the road with the OKC Astronomy Club. And we actually did International Observe the Moon Night at the Wheeler Ferris wheel in Oklahoma City on the south side of the river. And you can see the ferris wheel in the background. And the kids just here, we were able to project it down, had a big moon, had a good dance floor, and the kids get to dance on the moon. Sometimes we play things like Ben Morrison's moon dance, or we ask them if they know how to moonwalk. And then we can see if they know Michael Jackson's moonwalk. How about the next one, Vivian? I think it's another view. And you can see some of the kids just decide to sit. Some of them do all sorts of sit spins. But it is a joyous event. When we do it at the schools, the kids love this. And so at the ferris wheel, there weren't probably as many people as we have sometimes at the schools, but this was a great way to go. And then the next slide shows, towards the end of the night, and people were just before the ferris wheel closed, I actually had former students come up, and that's me and one of my former students just displaying. And the projectors up high, obviously, at this point, and the telescopes on the ground, and we're running it with quartz and projecting onto the ground. The next one is a view that came out of that one. I talked to Peter, and I said, Peter, what would it take? We have the Lunar Eclipse coming up in January 2019. What would it take to project onto the side of the museum? Because the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma has a great gray wall. And what you're seeing there is the entrance to the left, and we were able to put the moon up. We also had probably about 15 scopes set off on the side of the museum there, so people could kind of float from, this was pre-COVID, could float from one to the other. All the local astronomy groups and anyone who was a Norman person, a Norman resident probably came out to something like this. We advertised through the, it was through the school, the schools put out what they call Thursday folders, and the kids get all sorts of information at that point. The Girl Scout Astronomy Club, definitely this was, they had just constructed their first telescope and their eight-inch dob, and so they were part of this, and it was a great night. But let me show you what we were able to show, and this was sort of a, again, January of 2019, way before we were thinking about in terms of COVID. And so you can see the moon close to totality, and we got a picture. More people were at this point staring at the museum wall, then they were looking through telescopes. And so this eventually gave us the idea that this was one of the safe ways we could distance people when we had to. How about the next slide and see what we have? Okay. So last December, confronted with COVID, and last fall, Norman schools were virtual two weeks, we were hybrid two weeks, and then we went back virtual, and from October 12th on, we were in person all year. Fortunately, I had a site administration that kept us very, very safe, and they allowed us to have observations at our local elementary school that's about four miles outside of Norman in fairly dark skies. Not pristine, we have light pollution around us, but it's to the east of the town. And so we always have with the star party, we said, we want to do this for the great conjunction. And we said masking would be required. So we had about 10 telescopes that were willing to come that night. And we set them up about instead of six feet apart, we went 10 to 12. And I think you have to decide on your local, what kind of community spread there is as to how far apart you would put them. And we lined all these scopes up on the west side of the school. We noticed that people generally came in family groups or groups of friends who had been traveling together. So we definitely kept these groups six to 10 feet apart. And then we use the video set up to project the skies on the wall. We also had lice hall wipes handy that we could wash off any of the focusing mechanisms and things like that on the scope. So let me show you what we were able to do. We again had a great wall. And so what you're seeing to the left is actually Saturn and Jupiter and Saturn. And on the right, we had another setup because Mr. Mark Klein came, we have a very active radio club in the area. And these are the people who usually know all the electronics and are willing to troubleshoot and do things like that with us. Ladies, could you please close the door? I'm on it soon. Okay, thank you. I'm sorry. There's a lot of people running around here. And so we put the moon up here. And then we had the conjunction and people absolutely loved it. How about the next slide? And you can see how how close it went.  So instead of the ground, we went to we went to the outside, you know, we went up. And how about the next slide? This past week, I have been at the Okitex Star Party. And this is last year, obviously, our Okitex Star Party was canceled because of COVID. This year, we went ahead and and and held it. We had obviously fewer people because of COVID, but it was still extremely successful. We had clear skies most nights in the nights that wasn't clear, it would usually clear for whole sections of the night.  But outside, it went with a pick two.  So pick two of those. And that was a very, very helpful, you know, I think most of us felt safe. There were a lot of people who didn't attend the talks inside because they didn't want to be inside. A lot of people grabbed their food, ate outside. But it was an extremely successful Star Party. And my students from Norman North came with the new teacher and I helped them, you know, do the same thing. And we the kids were very good about masking. And they know it's a privilege of what we're doing. So we try different ways. We're looking at International Observe the Moon night next week. If we have good weather, I know OKC will will probably set up this year at Windsurfers Point. And they have they've already started publicizing in the papers. But the idea is even if you're outside, the observers prefer you come along and be masked. If not, we'll have masks handy and to offer to people and to be polite. But that's that's kind of the bottom line that since we are a private group, we want to play things safely. So if you have any questions on the technology, it probably takes a little longer to do something like that. But these are the glorious skies go to the next slide. And this photo is by one of our astrophotographers in the club, Chris Scott. And this is the way the Mesa country looks like with under red light conditions. And this was obviously a long, you know, photo time lapse photo. So if you have questions, please, please, please feel free to ask. And we have I live in Oklahoma and my governor does not want to mask mandate. So I think individuals and private groups have to have to take things into their own hands. And we want to do it safely. We want to go observing, but we want to take it safely. And I felt last year safe. But this year, there's no mass mandate in the schools. And I'm glad I'm retired.  Thank you so much, Eileen. Those pictures are amazing. Thank you. Thank you for sharing all of your great ideas. I hope you all have a really, really safe International Observe the Moon night and whatever that looks like for you. Thank you. I really appreciate and have a great night with the girl scouts. Yeah, we're going to take a really quick break. We're running a little behind. So we're just going to share a bit of music with you and we'll be back in a couple of minutes. Thank you all for tuning in from everywhere. Take good care. We'll be right back. Thanks to Winsink who just performed Luna Nova. That was a piece composed for the Moon by Mark Millettis and the video artist for that was Robin P. Gold. We thank you all so much. We'll share the link to those in the chat. There are quite a few and you'll be hearing a few more tonight. Thank you for that. I wanted to also encourage anyone who wants to join an International Observe the Moon night event that there are quite a few going on both virtual and in person. So make sure to check out the link to the events page on the International Observe the Moon night and we'll put that up in the chat if we haven't already. Thanks to everyone. Kayla, would you like to start the next hour off? Absolutely. Yes. Wow. So let's keep cruising right along here with a huge thanks to everyone joining us from all over the world and all different time zones in the first hour of our program. We're going to welcome now Marielle Colon Robles and Marielle is the principal investigator for NASA's globe cloud gaze program as well as wearing other very exciting hats and she's going to share with you a little bit about how you can get involved with NASA science. So welcome Marielle. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be with all of you today. I'm going to be talking a little bit about citizen science and observations and clouds. I know clouds are not always our best friends but we need them. They make our nights warm and there are other things that maybe you can do when you do have clouds. So a little bit about me. I'm from San Juan Puerto Rico. That's why my name sounds a little bit different and yes I got to go to the Adesibo Observatory before it broke down sadly last year but that inspired me to study nature even though I am an atmospheric scientist. I'm also a backyard astronomer and that's a picture of me last year looking on the conjunction and I've had the unique opportunity of being with the moon rocks collected by the Apollo mission. So I'm really excited for International Observe the Moon Night. I play sports as well and I've met a lot of people playing sports at NASA. That's my NASA volleyball team and we still play in COVID times. We just look for a space outside and I love music so I've really enjoyed that piece that we just heard before I started. Now not all clouds are created equal and usually around this time of the year we get some outtook cumulus clouds and stratus type clouds. We also get these thin wispy clouds which we call cirrus clouds and I think once you've noticed that not all clouds are created equal. Thank you so much for that. Here's a picture of the moon I took about a week ago and you notice these puffy clouds and you notice a ring around it. Those are all to cumulus clouds which kind of make it a little bit spooky for this time of the year which is really exciting but the color also tells you what is inside of those clouds. Clouds can be composed of water droplets, ice crystals or both but when there are ice crystals you get some beautiful things happening with the moon's reflection of the sunlight so the thickness of those ice clouds will result in halos or coronas like I have here some examples here. Also if there's just ice crystals in the air and they hit that moonlight just in the right spot you get some really spectacular moon halos and moon coronas and things like that so cold is the season for seeing all these spectacular things and also sadly sometimes it does rain when you want to see the moon like tonight here where I'm at in Virginia but that's okay rain is important we do need rain and not everybody knows that there's only two clouds I said it again two clouds that produce rain so there's only two cumulonimbus which is my favorite thunderstorms and then nimbo stratus clouds. Now when you're setting up like I've done with my family there's my husband and my daughter setting up for that conjunction picture that we took it's a great time to make some cloud observations. One of the things that we were running was the solar terminator problem and it's a problem when you're trying to study clouds the solar terminator is that line between the sunlight side of the earth and the dark side of the earth and when you're using satellites to study clouds some types of clouds kind of like disappear as you transition from looking at the sunlight being reflected from clouds and looking now at infrared images of the clouds so we call it the solar terminator problem that's a great time to make some cloud observations. Now remember also that the moon is out during the day as well particularly during solar eclipses so you can also make cloud temperature and other observations with the globe program and there's my daughter and her friend looking at the solar eclipse in 2017 with their NASA goggles. Now what is the globe program? Globe stands for global learning and observations to benefit the environment. It's NASA's largest and longest lasting citizen science program about the earth. Now citizen science means that you make observations even though you're not a scientist or an expert in the field and then us researchers who are studying this use your observations in our studies and so the globe program started in 1995 when teachers students and scientists came together on ways to use observations and collect observations for research purposes and here's a picture of our last face-to-face meeting with all the students from around the world because globe is represented by 126 different countries and here are all the students that were present in our last face-to-face annual meeting so we would love to have your observations through the globe program particularly of clouds because I'll get to see them. Now we engage with different communities and yes we have recursos en español así que si si hablas español or do you speak other languages I just said that there's resources in Spanish but because we are an international community we have resources in six different languages we have resources for teachers for educators after-school programs lifelong learners families and communities so what we do is that for your cloud observations the team here at NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton Virginia matches them to satellite data and then you get a NASA personalized email with your observations matched to satellite data pretty cool right it's really simple to use the app you can just download it for free it'll ask you for for cloud cover sky conditions if you're seeing dust storms or smoke plumes and then the coolest part is to take photographs it's really neat so you can download it for free you can reach us in multiple ways and we hope to get your observations of clouds either during the day or as you're setting up for night observations and don't forget citizen science is for everybody visit nasa's citizen science webpage to find out more about different programs about the earth the solar system the universe the sun all different types so thank you so much for having me today oh well that was wonderful thank you so much it's great to hear so you've made cloud look much less intimidating thanks even if you get clouded out for international and serve the moon night there is still ways there are still ways to participate in science so I hope you all download that app and and get observing whatever you happen to have in your skies thank you yes thank you very late we get really excited about observing the moon around international to the moon night each year but this isn't jumping off point we we hope that you like us will feel excited to observe all kinds of things in the universe around this not just on October October 16th 2021 but throughout the year and this is just one great way to do that next we are going to welcome Brandon Rodriguez who is a guest from the jet propulsion laboratories education team Brandon is an education specialist I've had the privilege and the opportunity to be in one of his education workshops and it was just great I'm so excited you're here with us today Brandon I'll turn it over to you yeah awesome thanks so much so good to see you again it's been like way too long too many years why did you leave California we miss you um my name is Brandon Rodriguez I work at NASA's jet propulsion laboratory uh in Los Angeles California um super excited to be here I I have been just kind of listening uh um over here on the side and I think it's really exciting how many people kind of have this union of the science that's being done and then just kind of the just the awe and the wonder of just looking at the images we saw these awesome pictures earlier um of the moon around Rome and it was beautiful uh and I think it's really cool to at the same time think that there's still science to be done and uh I think that's why I'm so excited about you know this this idea of international observable moon night as well as being able to speak to you guys today so um I just as a very quick background have a just the the most lucky position in the world because I get to be a scientist and a teacher uh so I still teach high school physics which is crazy to me um but I I work at NASA as well and I get to work with teachers and students all over the world and and kind of bring cool activities and uh resources to them so I wanted to show you guys a few of those and I thought uh in the in the theme of everything that we're doing today maybe I could share my screen really quick and tell you that in fact uh earlier this year I was very much observing the moon and I was observing it from the most wild place um on the Sophia observatory so Sophia as you can see here looks like a a normal plane that you might take to travel but as you can see in the middle there is actually a a door that opens and a three meter telescope is actually observing out as you're flying which is just just insane think about how uh incredibly specific every every motion needs to be to be able to make sure that you are looking at something like the moon without rocking around and being able to collect images so it's a really really amazing high tech device and uh we were actually observing the moon uh looking for water so here's the a couple pictures here's me trying to look cool and being excited and then on the right much more nervous as we were taking off so that was a the coolness quickly subsided um but the telescope from the inside looks like this and what you can see is uh that it's effectively like in a in a cylinder and it rotates all the way around so this is a giant counterweight and you have computers everywhere and you have these little like shock absorbers if you will to make sure that nothing rattles around and we were out looking for for ice uh in craters of the moon and found it which is really really exciting so we're trying to find resources on the moon so that the moon could serve as a little bit of a gateway of a jump off point if we ever want to really explore the solar system like perhaps to mars or beyond we need to have a means of a nice low gravity base in space for those operations to take place and that means resources so um as you guys kind of you know to the students watching uh get a chance to explore the moon remember again that we explore it both because it's beautiful and exciting but we also explore it scientifically as well um so I actually had some students uh prepare of this project these are some middle school kids um that uh kind of made a cool moon crater project and I encourage you guys to to do the same what they were doing was they just made a little uh you know a baking sheet with flour and cocoa and sprinkles and stuff like that to simulate the moon and then they asked well are craters always round or how deep do they go how steep is the angle so what they did is they took different rocks different shaped rocks and they kind of dropped them onto the moon they had these asteroid impacts on the moon uh from different angles and different strengths um and they just kind of observed to see what kind of impacts you get pretty neat uh so you know again you'll see them kind of go through different angles and play with different rock sizes and this is a good way to kind of simulate the you know multi-billion-year history of the moon to get a feel for why is it shaped this way why are there these deep craters and why do they still have water in them thank goodness because we're going to need it if we're ever going to build a lunar base um I'll point out that again the moon itself is not where we want to stop right we want to explore further and we do that with um very cool robotic scientific equipment like this guy here out of out of my lab the Perseverance rover which landed on Mars uh just earlier this year in February uh and here it is it's twin uh this is the engineering model which we still do driving tests on uh as we're kind of just operating a nice stationary turn and I'll even point out to you guys just get a feel even though you can see some of my colleagues in the back just so you can see just how big this is I brought you a wheel so this is one of the this is one of the wheels of the rover so just for a picture of scale six of these about half the size of me um aluminum on the outside titanium on the inside and about uh 40 pounds so that's that's my exercise for the day for sure um so again if we ever want to explore the moon further with rovers or we want to explore more of Mars with rovers or places like Titan and Enceladus all these other other moons don't forget there are so many other very exciting moons in our solar system uh that I very much want to observe I would love to send some missions to and that's really some of the cool science that jpl is doing is um exploring moons of Saturn and Jupiter uh and you know these places that have water or volcanoes and uh so so much exciting uh geology so I'm excited for you guys observe the moon that you can see uh and then go and get an awesome degree in science and observe start observing the moons even further away because I think that's where the real the real excitement starts so the last thing I'll I'll say since I'm almost out of time is you can find so many activities at this website this is the website that my colleagues and I maintain full of activities for teachers if you click up here on this teach section you're going to see like lesson planned activities um already on pdf already have answer keys and assessments and everything's just already made for you so that you're ready to deliver it to your students but to kids out there if you want to explore this learn section right here this is where you'll see activities like that moon craters um I was just doing one last night with some students where we are making little rubber band powered rovers so it's kind of like an old hot wheels car if you if you remember and uh it's got a rubber band and you can wind it up and let it drive off so we were trying to race to see who could who could make the best rover drive across the backyard so again so many cool opportunities and I encourage you guys to you know be in awe of the moon it's beautiful and amazing but think about it not just from uh the beauty of it but from the scientific promise of it as well I think it's going to be really really exciting as you guys get older and uh come work at nasa with with people like me and model a and um we're waiting we're waiting for you guys to have cool careers alongside us so thank you guys so much I really appreciate your time thank you brandon that is great there are so many great resources right there on that website we use it all the time um it's really fun to be able to get out and start doing public engagement again I'm so excited thanks for joining us that's great uh all right up next we have a whole team from the lunar and planetary institute I want to introduce the manager for uh education and public engagement christine shoupla who's here hi christine hi everyone there's also oh we're so glad to have you thank you um charoel web is joining us as the public engagement lead and also yolanda ballard is here as the program coordinator and they have some great hey keep your eyes on the road we've got you here um we have a great video from this team and I think if Scott if you can pull that one up we will kick us off with that and then hear from them absolutely let's go ahead and get started the activity that you're about to see is called splat and you'll you'll let's let's share with you a little bit about the activity okay I think I have it so hi I'm Katrina clipper hi my name is camera here hi my name is going foster and this is my daughter thank you all so much all right so we're starting with our splat activity please go ahead and hold up the water balloons so we can see your water balloons yeah um can any of you tell me how how how why are your water balloons how big are they five inches five inches seven awesome so we've got a five inch water balloon and a seven inch water balloon okay whenever you are let's um let's start by on the count of why don't we do a countdown why don't we do a countdown for a second okay here we go five four three two one everybody throw your water balloon we got to throw it hold it pick it up and throw it hold sometimes it takes a few times for it to break so now let's take a look at the splat can you all show me how big your splats are on the ground how big are the splats how wide are your splats does anybody want to estimate how wide your splats are big big my big real is it a lot bigger than five inches seven inches any idea how many times bigger it is than the five inches or seven inches okay three times bigger okay how many times bigger just split than the below about ten times bigger okay so at least three and maybe as much as ten times bigger when an asteroid hits the moon or mars or another planet do you think the asteroid just sits there on the ground or do you think it breaks up into pieces like your water balloon did break up absolutely it breaks up into pieces and do you think do you think the hole that it makes in the ground is the same size as the asteroid or do you think it might be a lot bigger than the asteroid a lot bigger you're exactly right you're exactly right any final thoughts what did a great job thank you so much let's see everybody's wonderful faces one last time this is a really fun activity that you can do with kids and with adults uh who doesn't like water balloons right you just need an outside space or maybe a patio space uh but the idea here is you can do this activity maybe with the activity that we just saw right we just saw an activity with crater boxes where you're dropping materials into a box but in addition to that um this activity shows a different aspect of the model of craters so we are seeing a little bit more about craters and how they work this way we're finding out that you can um you can when you have an impact initially they weren't really sure what was happening right they thought that maybe the impact would cause uh parts of the asteroid to be left there and that's why they mined out meteor crater so extensively they were looking for pieces of an asteroid but in fact it gets destroyed largely gets vaporized you get a few pieces here and there but it's largely destroyed so unlike the the first activity where you get to see features of a crater quite nicely in this activity you don't see many of the features of the crater but you see that the the impactor the asteroid or the comet that ran into the moon that runs into other planets is destroyed and you also get to measure the dimensions uh and you can do it with lots of water balloons and take multiple examples here it should be about 10 times wider ideally so uh yes thank you morele uh it's it's I like both of these activities very much they're fun to do together we've got a few minutes and we thought we'd spend just a few minutes talking about craters on the moon and so let's go ahead and show you some pictures here uh Orientalae basin of course is a type of crater that's very large and it has multiple rings around it you can see so some craters some of the biggest ones have multiple rings and Orientalae and many of the largest ones have since been flooded in with basalt lava after the initial impact form those nice round features that we see for the sea of tranquility and things like that but in addition to that there's other types of craters as well there's some that are smaller often the ones that are really bright tend to be the ones that are the newest ones because over time on the moon the moon gets darker because of interaction with particles from the sun so so the really bright ones tend to be the youngest ones some of them are complex where they have those mountains in the middle and these craters also are revealing things about the moon and about its structure and what lies underneath and so each crater tells us more about the moon about the composition about what's happened we can use this craters and study the fingerprints of spectroscopy to tell us more about the composition at the top and the bottom and anything that's been excavated and thrown out we have scientists who've been studying the moon studying impacts studying craters all over the place and we wanted to let you know a little bit more about this so we're happy to have any questions from you we also wanted to let you know where you can find these the splat activity with the balloon exploding is at lps website there's also lots more information about impact craters and we hope that you'll consider doing some of these with your family and friends and with your audiences if you're doing programs for international observe the moon night easy doesn't use a whole lot of materials so i'm going to stop sharing for just a couple of seconds and see if we have any questions or comments and vivian do you have anything that you want to add surel yolanda do either of you have anything you want to add i was just going to say we put those links in the chat so you should see them coming up thank you so much christine that they look like they were having such a good time there's water balloons are such a treat especially in the evening when it gets when it's been a hot day exactly exactly so much fun to do and thank you surel for for helping us to connect with this these wonderful families who recorded this with us this week so that we'd have it for tonight and thank you so much for joining us even on a saturday it's great to see you all as well happy global moon party party on thank you Christine we will um feel free to pass notes on in the chat and if you have any questions that's a great place to put them thank you all so much that's awesome um next up we have a really lovely guest we've got dr john bobear joining us from slew.org and um we have two really cool videos from him first as an introduction to a really lovely teachers program that they have um and i'll actually just let him introduce himself and tell you all about that welcome john thank you so much for the end for having me on during this global moon party i'm so happy to be here and talking with everybody and celebrating this the nearest celestial neighbor to us i think the moon is how a lot of us got hooked i love hearing that from john lucca earlier um scott i think we've got a video lined up to go here all right let's see about that greetings are you excited for tonight's 2021 international reserve the moon night kickoff party i sure am my name is dr john h bobear and i'm the director of curriculum at slew a vibrant community of students educators and astronomers sharing their knowledge and discoveries of the universe using an arsenal of powerful robotic telescopes at premiere observatories in both hemispheres slew provides a direct means for students to connect with the universe and fosters a spirit of collaborative citizen science from the next generation i'm speaking to you all from las vegas nevada but tonight you'll be enjoying the views of the young crescent moon from our flagship observatory in the institute of astrophysics of the canary islands located on the island of tenefri off the northwestern coast of africa we are currently looking through slew's canary to ultra wide field telescope just to let you know slew's southern observatory hemisphere is in latahisa chili in association with the catholic university of chili i also want to give a shout out to anybody who knows a teacher or educator or knows a parent who has a child at school basically anybody in education if you know anybody in education or related to somebody who knows somebody in education and please hop on over to slew.org slew.org has free student accounts for classrooms and light polluted areas ready and waiting to connect your students with the stars this grant aims to help one million students nationwide experience the wonder of space from their classrooms and home computers now it's a very ambitious goal but you know the saying if you shoot for the moon and miss you'll land among the stars you can learn more about the slew space exploration grant at slew.org school will be back next week on nasa tv to provide live views of the moon during the international observe the moon night's main event until then enjoy the lunar views. hey don thank you so much that's a good reminder that next week on nasa tv will be on international observe the moon night the 16th we will have a live broadcast then as well so not here but on nasa tv um thank you so much what a cool program and i'm so excited to get all the teachers looking at the moon i also want to thank you for sharing an almost live mooncast this was recorded just a few hours ago because the moon has set where the telescope is it got pretty low in the sky so that is one of the problems with starting a moon party the week before the international observe the moon night it's not ideally situated for observing but all this week in the evening you will have great views of the moon make sure to check that out john do you have anything else you want to say before we play the story no that thank you so much again for letting me come on here and talk a little bit to everybody and i really hope that we enjoy the the inka lunar myth this is an amazing video that milton dilla royale has put has recorded for us and i want to share this all with you thank you john for making this happen scott if you want to bring that next video up hello dr john wolver from slew again next an educator and slew ambassador milton via royal will share an inka myth about our moon titled el dororoso el mor de osoro y la luna inka or in english the crushing love of the fox in the inka moon enjoy se enamoro de mamaquilla la luna debido a su hermosura este personaje toma la forma del sorro andino en su forma antropomorfa o humana atok juega dos papeles a menudo es un personaje muy querido que utiliza sus habilidades para convencer a los demás de hacer lo que él quiere otras veces puede ser muy engañoso y vil por conveniencia propia a veces el sorro es un ladrón pero también se lo ve como inteligente y sagaz como las características atribuidas a los sorros en otras partes del mundo la historia prosigue diciendo que atok utilizó todos sus encantos para seducir a la bella mamaquilla pero la diosa permanecía siempre esquiva y sin importar lo que así el sorro ella mantenía una distancia prudente el sorro persistió y fue esa persistencia la que finalmente ayudó atok a lograr su cometido atok había encontrado la forma de subir hasta las alturas donde residía mamaquilla ella premió los esfuerzos de su galán y decidió aceptar su cortejo pero cuando el sorro se elevó a los cielos para estar con su amada ella lo apretó tan fuerte contra su pecho que sufocó a su admirador como resultado de esto su perfectamente blanca vestidura quedó manchada por los restos de atok produciendo las manchas oscuras que vemos en la superficie de la luna hoy en día la moraleja de esta historia sugiere fuertemente que seamos cautos cuando nos aproximemos a un dios o una diosa porque sus poderes son muy superiores a los nuestros aún en las situaciones más románticas wow thank you so much melton educators slew.org has free student accounts for classrooms and light polluted areas to connect your students with the stars ready in waiting for you oh beautiful thanks for having me thank you john so much that is beautiful you're welcome i hope we really enjoyed that myth i i can tell you every time i look at the moon after putting this together i can see a talk up there and thanks to melton i see you're joining us online i appreciate that story so much it was really beautiful all right thank you i hope you'll have a wonderful time observing this week scott i think i'm turning it over to you is that true i think you are okay so we will we'll start this video with amy caminski hi scott thanks for having me today my name is amy caminski and i believe nasa's public prize competitions challenges and crowdsourcing efforts where we look for people outside of nasa to help us solve our toughest challenges without a box solutions i'm really excited to talk with you about how you can get involved in nasa's mission we conduct public prize competitions and challenges at nasa to bring forward unique solutions and to diversify participation as we look for clever ways to explore the solar system sustain human space travelers build more robust aircraft and more we value the different perspectives that can be brought to bear on these nasa undertakings by companies outside of the aerospace industry and by people everywhere our work creates solutions to problems and brings visibility to our participants often leading to investments from outside and supporting the growth of markets beyond aerospace we've run hundreds of challenges to date and thousands of people worldwide have been able to participate our challenges are open to teams and individuals and we offer cash prizes that vary in size along with non-cash awards and benefits right now we have several moon related competitions open that will benefit the Artemis program that you can participate in or follow along with the big idea challenge invites student teams to develop robots that don't move with wheels we're looking for robots that can hop float or fly up to eight teams will win development awards of up to 180 thousand dollars two other student challenges are coming up in just a few weeks lunatics and lunatics jr both are looking at excavating on the moon and challenging students to design unique concepts for excavators that can operate in lunar gravity in this challenge college students can win scholarship money while grade school students could win an opportunity to meet with the director of nasa's kennedy space center we're also planning the next phases of our watts on the moon challenge and our break the ice lunar challenge in what's on the moon we're looking for teams to demonstrate energy distribution management and storage technologies for upcoming lunar missions 4.5 million dollars in awards are on the line in the break the ice challenge we're again looking at excavating on the moon we are asking teams to demonstrate their approaches for digging up icy regolith and delivering resources to a central location there are many other competitions in planning right now and we're looking for your participation if you are looking for a way to get involved and contribute to the exciting work happening at nasa this is your ticket if you're interested keep an eye on nasa.gov slash solve solv where we post all of our competitions and crowdsourcing opportunities thank you so much for having me and enjoy celebrating observe the moon night thanks Amy it was really lovely for her to have a chance to share that with us she is um uh works with the nasa artemist prizes challenges and crowdsourcing programs and um there are so many ways to get involved observing the moon and and thinking of wonderful creative ways to explore space so i really appreciate that um i want to introduce two of my favorite humans on earth and uh who have some really cool other ways to observe the moon and do some science with that from the astronomical league we've got erin clevelandson who's joining us from texas yes houston texas houston texas thank you and john gas as well these are two gentlemen who have been instrumental in some of these observing programs and they have one that they like to share with you tonight so i'll let you all take it away thanks for joining well thank you very much vivian um and i'm going to let john uh take the stage in a little bit but i want to start out by sharing our screen maybe there we go um so yes we are from the astronomical league and uh we have actually more than one observing program we'd like to share with you tonight so first let me tell you a little bit about us uh i'm an observing program director with the astronomical league and also a program coordinator for some of our observing programs john gas who's the other person with me tonight is a past president of the astronomical league and he also is a program coordinator and more on the programs in a little bit uh so roughly what i want to look at is a little advice for observing the moon then we'll discuss the observe the moon night and then we're going to discuss the astronomical league observing programs related to the moon because there are a number of programs that are available so john let me pass it off to you oh wait let me do one more slide first uh the question i wanted to address was why the moon yeah we've heard lots of wonderful things tonight about all the really cool things you can do with the moon and how wonderful it really is to observe but from my perspective the reason we want to look at the moon is it's our nearest celestial neighbor everybody else is a good bit further away and it's available and easy to observe every month it's always there and if you miss something this month you can catch it next month and the really cool thing is it's easily visible with just your eyes you don't have to have binoculars or a telescope which means anybody can do it any night the new moon is up when the weather cooperates so now to you john all righty thank thank you erin uh before i talk about the bottle cap projector i'd like to see a few more words about the moon and the observing programs you know we have a rather select um exclusive group of people who have walked on the moon about 12 people have done that we have about 24 people who have orbited the moon now with the astronomical league has as a number of observing programs uh focused on the moon and really the whole purpose of that is to enable people uh for themselves to go to the moon by using their their telescopes once they complete these programs they will have seen many of the same sites that the astronauts have seen they will have seen uh craters large and small vast basaltic plains they will have seen mountains they will have seen uh rills they will have seen volcanic domes and so on many many many things if you use your telescope you can see the enough enough preaching right now to talk about the what we call here the bottle cap projector i got this uh information really from uh fred schaeff back in about the year 2000 he was discussing this and then guy otwell picked it up in his astronomical calendar very simple concept of what to do here if you drill a hole in an opaque object such as a bottle cap a hole of 16th inch diameter look at that uh hold that up to your eye and look at the moon look at uh at a full moon because this hole is only about a 16th of an inch in diameter it cuts down the light dramatically i think about only four percent of the light is let let through that that would normally enter your eye's pupil so that means the glare uh from the bright full moon is cut down substantially but even more important or just as important um the only light that's let into your eye is is it goes through the center portion of of your eye where most of your optical defects in your vision don't lie astigmatism generally lies around the outside portion of your eye for instance so your visual acuity will be increased substantially so believe it or not or strangely enough that if you take a bottle cap like this with that 16th of an inch hole 16th of an inch hole in it and point it towards the moon hold it up to your eye and point it towards the moon you will see a greatly reduced moon there'll be hardly any glare in it your visual acuity will be substantial so you'll be able to easily see the the various mario on the moon uh for a quick project though i you could draw draw the moon as you see it with the mario christium off on the eastern side of the moon come back a few a week later or the next month or so and you do it again and you will see that the gap between them um eastern edge of the of the mario and the uh limb of the moon will have changed a little bit so you will be seeing the effects of lunar vibration just by using this so-called bottle cap projector it's really easy to do you don't want to have anything really small than a 16th of an inch if you go down to a 30 second the moon just becomes way way too dim if you go up to an eighth of an inch uh or so uh you will be letting in uh more more light obviously but also more light in the outer portion of your eye and your acuity will will drop considerably so 16th seems to be the sweet spot for this this project and how anybody can do it so the next time that you're out there and the phone doesn't have to be full moon but it has to be a bright moon uh try this and it that is really cool uh now on the next slide which hopefully erin will click for me thank you um i have a little story to tell which i think a lot of seasoned amateur astronomers as well as beginning amateur astronomers can relate to you know you're out there uh with with some friends um at somebody else's house you don't have your own telescope they have a telescope that they haven't used for quite a while it's in the closet so the and and the moon is out and they they want to look at the moon since you're the astronomer they're really kind of looking at you to do this so they get the telescope out set it up it may have a finder scope on it may not if it does have a finder perhaps it's way out of whack as far as alignment goes so you're expected to find the moon now if if you have never found the moon before with a telescope uh let me assure you it's not a snap it's not it's not easy to do you just don't point your telescope and you got the moon the moon is only what half a degree in size pretty small really pretty small area of the sky so it's hard to to point your telescope initially right at the moon but an easy way of doing this because remember all your friends are standing there looking at you you're the astronomer you know what to do and you're looking like an idiot because you can't find the moon well let me think the moon's the brightest thing in the sky how can you not find it well you get behind the telescope point it up to the moon to where you think it should be you might be really lucky and the moon might be in your field of view of the eyepiece but probably it's not easy thing to do is take out the eyepiece look down the focus or two try to center your eye in the focus focus for two and when you look down at the if it's the reflecting telescope at the mirror at the primary mirror you'll see the glow of the moon some and left or right up or down so to place the glow the bright glow the moon close to that second reflection that you're going to be seeing um you know you gotta just put the eyepiece back in and there's the moon so instead of taking you know five minutes of excuses and kind of embarrassment before you zero in on this thing well you can do it within 15 seconds and your reputation is maintained so that's something to think about try it next time you don't even have to have friends around you or try it in the privacy of your own home set your telescope outside and try to do it like this you can also do it for finding a venus or jupiter something that's fairly bright in the sky something that you can see down through your focus or two on onto your primary mirror and be able to zero it in that way so go ahead and try that that's what I got that we're from the astronomical league and we just want to make astronomy more accessible to people and give up some satisfaction of finding it and you don't get much satisfaction of all your friends are kind of laughing behind your back when you can't find the moon so this will help things out believe me so thank you for your time and listening to that that's what I have okay thank you john um I have a few more things I need to cover I see we're already out of time so I'm going to talk fairly quickly to try to get these points across uh the first thing we want to talk about is joining the party so we do have Observe the Moon night coming up and we want to encourage people to go out there and actually observe the moon from all around the world of course it is on the 16th host an event or just personally observe whatever is important to you and working in conjunction with the international Observe the Moon night team we have put together a certificate which is available and available for download so if you go out and observe print yourself a certificate put your name on it and relish in the joy of what you did how wonderful it was if you happen to be lucky enough to be hosting an event even if it's for just your family or perhaps the neighborhood then we encourage you to get a download of the certificate as well and go ahead and print copies out for them as well so there's the website uh it's the astronomical league version but that's the website where the certificate's available for download uh this is what the certificate looks like i'm just going to skip over that because i'm really out of time but we also have a second option so in the past the astronomical league has worked with NASA to come up with something we call NASA observing challenges and we have done that again for this one international Observe the Moon night so there are some requirements but it is open to all you do not have to be a member of the astronomical league to participate so you observe the moon and we give you about a week to do it the reason you can't start before the 15th is some of the features we want you to find aren't available until you get a fairly good gibbous moon so you do have to wait till the 15th which of course is the day before but then we also you can go for about a week after that and still get all the features that you need to get sketch what you see with just your eyes do an outreach activity so this does not necessarily mean an outreach event where you've got people looking through telescopes but do something to share the excitement of observing the moon with other people uh so do that activity and then submit your information to the coordinator and we do have a deadline so by november 22nd i am the coordinator so uh my information is on this website uh but if you want more information on that at the astronomical league website uh just check it out and it tells you everything i'm going to tell you but in a much at your own much more at your own pace so what do we want you to look at we have a list of more than 10 items and the requirement is you have to identify 10 of these in your sketch so a bunch of them are a yeah because that's the big dark spots they're very easy to see but in addition to that there's a couple craters that are visible uh the crater rays from crater Copernicus are also visible and the woman in the moon so we heard about the fox in the moon and had i known we were going to have that story i probably would have chosen the fox in the moon instead because that's new to me but the woman in the moon is actually very easy and i think really looks like a woman in the moon so this is a picture of the moon and this is a picture of the woman in the moon complete with her pigtails you can see your eye her nose her mouth and her chin uh so i encourage you all to go out and try to find the woman in the moon uh want to spend also a very brief moment here talking about the observing programs at the astronomical league uh so for most of the programs you do need to be a member uh either through a local astronomy club or as a member at large and we have close to 75 or so observing programs that cover everything from soup to nuts however there are four that are very specific related to the moon so i wanted to just mention those in passing we have a lunar observing program it involves 100 features does require a telescope and it requires you to observe throughout a month or multiple months if it takes you that long because of weather we also have a binocular lunar observing certificate that is a subset of that observing program in addition to that we have a lunar two observing program which is designed to make it a little more challenging for you so you have to actually time things you have to plan observations most of them are paired so you do one when you get a long shadow and then you also do one with a very short or no shadow to see the difference in what the features look like and then the last one our newest lunar program is lunar evolution observing and the neat thing is just like the earth the moon has gone through different phases in its history and you can actually pick out details and tell what part of that history they belong to based on what they look like and how they interact with other features so i'm going to stop there i do have one more slide i'm only going to show it to you because i know we don't really have time for questions but i wanted to have everybody look at my question mark because i thought it was cool very nice okay so back to you vivian ah erin and john that's great i had no idea about the looking down the eyepiece that is a great tip thank you so much and i can't wait to do the learn lunar observing challenge this year very very excited and we'll share some slides with you at the end about some good trivia on the moon that john has shared with us so thank you both so much we're going to take a quick break for all of us and and we'll be back in about five minutes meanwhile we have some great music again oh this time we've got a video from greg varni coming up is that what's coming up next scott magnificent desolation desolation that is it i want to just say thanks to jamie dupuy who is the original music composer for this and allowed us to use it so thanks to both jamie and gary thanks and then also combined with that is another performance from wincink uh debbie waltzing on the moon wonderful right so maybe a little bit longer than five minutes okay seven minutes we'll see you in seven minutes after these all right yep thanks scott i don't know if it's just me but i couldn't hear you just now oh it's all you at this point fabulous thank you so much for lining up those lovely selections and for all of the video and audio magic that has been happening so far tonight scott robert's explore alliance everybody virtual applause yes so that last piece that we just heard was debbie waltzing on the moon performed by wincink composed by mark melitz and the video artist is robin gold uh before that we saw magnificent desolation with an original soundtrack by jamie dupuy's and visual composition by gary arnie so a huge shout out and thanks to all of those artists for sharing their work with us this evening next up we've got our nasa moon views hour our final hour of the program and to get that started i am so excited to welcome my colleague stacey titigan of nasa scottered space flight center to provide some highlights from recent and upcoming boner science over to you stacey hi everyone it's so great to be here tonight for this wonderful event and as kaylor mentioned my name is stacey titigan and my role for international observe the moon night is that of international partnership coordinator which means that i get to work with people all around the world and for this presentation i'm going to focus on some recent news as it relates to the moon but because there's so much that happened this is just a brief overview and as well i'm going to look at what's ahead in lunar related topics as well so there are a lot of things that happened this year in moon news so this presentation is by no means a complete account i did however want to bring in a more international perspective and so we'll highlight some nasa related moon updates as well as news from other countries around the world so 2021 started out with marking the 50th anniversary of apollo 14 as well as apollo 15 later in the year so apollo 14 was the third human moon landing and with alan shepherd and ed mitchell setting foot on the lunar surface on february 5th of 1971 almost 10 months after apollo 13's intended landing date and two highlights from this mission include al shepherd hitting two golf balls on the moon at the end of the last moonwalk and stewart rooster bringing hundreds of tree seeds with him to the moon with many now growing on the earth as moon trees and then the 50th anniversary of apollo 15 followed in july this was the fourth human moon landing and this mission saw the first flight of the lunar roving vehicle also called the moon buggy and dave scott also demonstrated gaolio's discovery about falling objects in gravity fields when he simultaneously dropped a feather and a hammer and they both hit the ground at the same time so this is an especially exciting time for lunar science and exploration nasa's artemist program plans to land the first woman and first person of color on the moon within the coming years and features collaborations with commercial and international partners and this will promote equity signaling to people around the world that they too can see themselves among the stars nasa's artemist missions also include sending a suite of new science instruments and technology demonstrations to study the moon and establishing a long-term presence there so there have been a lot of developments in the artemist program in 2021 um so be sure to check out the artemist website for the full details which they'll which will be included in the chat box but i did want to just highlight one particular highlight or update and that's the naming of the mannequin that will be launching on artemist one which is nasa's uncrewed flight test of the space launch system rocket and orion spacecraft around the moon later this year or early next year so commander munican campus is the official name of the artemist one mannequin the name campus is a dedication to arturo campus a key player in bringing apollo 13 safely back to earth and there have been many developments to the artemist program in the international realm as well and one of these updates comes from the european space agency for isa is contributing to humankind's return to the moon with its european service modules that will be incorporated into upcoming artemist missions so as i mentioned nasa will be launching artemist one from kennedy space center in florida and this uncrewed mission will carry the orion spacecraft which will incorporate isa's european service module which was built and tested by erbis bremen in germany with the help of 10 european nations and then another international development for the artemist program comes from the canadian space agency canadarm three will be canada's contribution to nasa's gateway which is a vital component of artemist that will serve as a multi-purpose outpost orbiting the moon canada canadarm three is highly autonomous robotic system will use cutting edge software to perform tests around the moon without the need for human intervention this next next generation canadian robotic system will be designed to maintain repair and inspect the gateway capture visiting vehicles and enable science both in lunar orbit and on the surface of the moon among other tasks and the lunar reconnaissance orbiter is my next topic and it's nasa's flagship mission at the moon and i know andrea jones mentioned this at the beginning of the broadcast but it's actually what helped start international observatory night and it's been orbiting the moon for over 10 years elaro is building on the legacy of apollo and is reshaping our understanding of our nearest neighbor in space and it's helping us prepare for the next phase in human exploration of the moon through the artemist program using data from elaro lunar prospector and the moon mineralogy mapper instrument on board indria's trondrian one spacecraft scientists have identified likely location locations for nasa's artemist missions to find and collect pieces of the moon's mantle and the team of scientists generated this map that i'm showing now which shows the thorium concentration across the vast south pole achin basin which is on the lunar far side and it reveals the distribution of mantle materials that were violently ejected during this basin forming impact high thorium areas are shown in red with purple and gray representing lower abundances and you can see two craters in the northwestern region of the basin that are exhibiting especially high thorium abundance and this suggests the presence of abundant mantle materials that are currently exposed on the surface there and these precious rocks born deep within the moon can help us understand how our moon and other rocky worlds evolved now let's take a look at what's coming up in lunar related news so nasa is currently working with several american companies to deliver science and technology to the lunar surface through the commercial lunar payload services initiative also called clips because we love acronyms so this program enables the quick acquisition of lunar delivery services from companies to bring an assortment of robotic payloads to the moon's surface the first clips instruments are planned for launch early next year and i won't go through them all but they do include payloads from astrobotic intuitive machines firefly aerospace and massed-in space systems so one of the clips missions heading to the moon is called viper or the volatiles investigating polar exploration rover part of the Artemis program viper will launch in 2023 for delivery to the moon by astrobotics griffin lander viper is nasa's first mobile robotic mission to the moon and will land near the western edge of nobile crater at the moon's south pole and it will map and explore the region's surface and subsurface for water and other resources and now moving on to some more international moon news the korea pathfinder lunar orbiter is south korea's first lunar mission and it will be equipped with five payloads developed in korea and one payload developed by nasa it's scheduled to launch in august of 2022 with the goals of developing original lunar exploration technologies demonstrating a space internet and conducting conducting scientific investigations of the lunar environment topography and resources the smart lander for investigating moon or slim is a japan aerospace exploration agency mission designed to demonstrate accurate lunar landing techniques by a small spacecraft slim is a mission for researching the pinpoint landing technology necessary for future lunar probes and verifying this on the surface of the moon with a small scale probe slim is scheduled to launch as a ride share payload with the x-ray imaging and spectroscopy mission in 2022 from japan and those are just a few of the moon updates from this year and i wanted to thank you all so much for your attention and you can actually find an expanded version of this presentation on moon dot nasa dot gov at the link that will be included in the chat so thank you yes thank you so much stacey for joining us with those updates that's really exciting stuff and like stacey said there's much more to explore so we'll be adding some more links in the chat as we move forward here next up we are going to get to hear from someone who's real job title is visualizer but whose job could also be described as literally transporting us to other worlds via amazing data science and that person is urnie right of nasa's scientific visualization studio so urnie i'll turn it over to you thank you for being here all right i i always feel bad when i make other people say scientific visualization studio because it's kind of a mouthful we always just say sbs and stacey mentioned moon trees there is a moon tree in front of the visitor center at goddard where i work although i haven't been there in a couple of years visitor center has been closed for obvious reasons and i hope it's still there um but that's kind of a cool legacy of apollo 14 so i make pictures of the moon based on the data that we get primarily from lunar reconnaissance orbiter i've been working with illaro since it launched in 2009 and this is what it looks like in orbit this this image was actually made by my friend chris meany but all the other things that you'll see are things that i made um just to give you an idea of what illaro has been able to accomplish it's a mapping mission it's it's mapping the surface of the moon um from orbit and what i'm showing right now is a computer model of the surface of the moon based on the best information we had before illaro went there and this is how that has changed based on data from just illaro's first two years this is um schrodinger basin which is a an impact feature near the south pole and something this topography allows us to do now is in conjunction with another mission called grail map the mass distribution to the gravity beneath the surface and this tells us something about the composition of the crust and how thick it is and a lot of things about the energy of impacts like this um so it's it's a bunch of data that i get to play with all the time um one of the things i've done that that some people in the audience might be familiar with is this annual moon phase and vibration visualization um i happen to have here what the moon looks like right now or maybe 15 minutes ago um and a week from now it's going to look like this um on the night of international observable night um this is particularly interesting to me because um the vibration very much favors the northeast quadrant of the moon that's in the upper right corner of the image that you're looking at and so you'll get a very good view of marihambultianum and some of the other features that are normally not very visible uh on that side because the moon has our view of the moon at least has changed a little bit and allowed that edge to become a little bit more exposed overall although we see the same face of the moon um we see about 59 percent of it not just 50 percent because of this sort of optical um vibration this this apparent wobbling in the moon so one of the other things i've been able to do is map solar eclipses this is from the total solar eclipse from 2017 and i hope some of you had an opportunity to travel to the path of totality and actually see that happen because it was a really cool thing i happened to be in nebraska but i put up a organ here um one of the things i discovered while mapping this and this had been found by my friend michael zeiler a few years earlier is that the shape of the shadow is not a smooth oval it's this sort of polygon shape um and i'm in the process of writing something up that will explain why that happens but it's basically because the moon isn't a smooth sphere the mountains and valleys in the moon um either block or allow the sun to come through for just a couple more seconds and that changes the shape of the shadow on the ground the shadow also interacts with the terrain and something i was able to do when i made these maps is um calculate the shadows um taking into account the effect of you know the cascades and the rockies as the shadow passed over them it makes little ruffles in that shape it's pretty cool so hopefully if you whether or not you were able to see the 2017 eclipse i hope some of you are preparing to travel to see the eclipse in 2024 i'm going to be in texas visiting with my sister who's about 30 miles outside the path and you know i can't think of a more exciting interesting thing to see um as a as a natural phenomenon particularly for sky watchers a thing that happens during the day then a total solar eclipse is just very cool so stacey also mentioned that we're sending um both people and robots to the moon and in particular to the south pole something i just worked on was the announcement of the landing site for viper that stacey described and this is still from an animation that i made that sort of zooms up on that landing site that square in the middle is 10 kilometers on a side about six miles on a side and that's the area that viper is going to explore something i'm doing more broadly is sort of illumination studies of the surface of the moon near the south pole because that's a place that's unlike any place else even on the earth the sun never gets more than a degree and a half above the horizon and the earth kind of stays in the same place it sort of bobs up and down but if you're standing on the surface of the south pole the earth is upside down that's uh south america that you can see in that picture and rotating backwards so the environment there is very different when we send both robots and people there we're going to have to figure out how to deal with the fact that the sun is never very high half the time it's below the horizon we may be designing EVAs and and operations on the surface that rely more on earth shine the reflected light from the earth because the earth is 40 to 75 times brighter than the full moon but you know you have to take into account what phase the earth is in and whether it's a cloudy day which makes it brighter and honestly we're not 100 sure that people in particular are going to be able to operate in the dim light of the reflected earth so that's something that we're continuing to look into and I'm continuing to sort of visualize the lighting conditions to try to speak to that so I thought I would give everybody a little heads up about how I do this Chris Meany made that picture of LRO because my modeling skills are not great if it doesn't involve wrapping something on a sphere I'm not sure what I'm doing but this is how I make a moon I start with this map of the color of the moon this has every point on the surface illuminated at the same sun angle and then I add to that a map of elevation and in this image the bright areas are very high and the dark areas are very low you can kind of see it's a it's a funny shape but you can see how low the entire south pole ache in basin is at the left and right edges at the bottom of that map it's one of the biggest impact features in solar system and the software that I use knows how to wrap these two maps onto a sphere and then all I have to do is calculate where is the sun where is the earth where are the things that I want to show and it will automatically figure out the shadow the shading the lighting conditions and that's how I make a lot of the most of the imagery of the moon that I make the good news is that I've released both of these onto the SPS website in fact everything that I've shown you is on the SPS website I'll tell you about that in just a second but I want to show you too what my software looks like in the upper right it's showing me the sphere with the moon maps wrapped onto it and all the other stuff is what you know telling the software how to paint the surface and and how to add that illumination or the elevation map so that it can accurately depict the shadows this is the homepage of the SPS website and I encourage everybody to go there and check it out we have thousands of videos and it's not just about the moon I happen to be the moon guy in the studio but there's a lot of earth science and you know all kinds of cool NASA stuff there I feel very fortunate working in the SPS and also working with the with the LRO team that includes Kayla and Stacey I get to deal with you know this really excellent data I get to interact with people who are very good at communication and and telling the public about what we do because that's basically my job is to take the data and exhibit it in ways that educate people about what NASA is doing and I also get to interact with scientists who are actually you know working with the spacecraft and collecting the data and and forming it into things that can be used by other people so if you'd like to make your own moon you can go to the SPS website and look for something called the CGI moon kit it's currently one of the most popular stories which makes it easy to find just click on that most popular stories link at the bottom but this will give you the maps that you would need to use in your own 3d software to me to make moons at any time in the past in the future and you can do that with the free software too there's free 3d software out there so you don't have to make a big investment and that's my little deal that's my spiel awesome many thanks Ernie for that peek into that amazing world of data visualization I know Dave Prosper who has been helping us with links and chat all night has been pushing some links to the socializations out across our streaming channels so if you're out there watching and you would like to see more please do check those out they're really beautiful and and very very informative and so glad to hear from you about those today Ernie thank you again for coming with us here and thanks everyone who's still out there hanging out with us we're so glad to be here with you we're going to hear now from Marina Gemma who is a phd student at the American Museum of Natural History and you all just heard a little bit from Ernie about data visualization Marina is going to show you an interactive data visualization software that is available to you open for your use and we will transfer over to Marina now welcome Marina thanks for being here hi Kayla thanks for having me and Scott would we be able to spotlight both Marina and open space for this segment let's see let's do Marina first okay and what is the other one open space it's another video feed in this one ah well sorry to make things difficult for you I don't know that's okay we will get to the ritual moon with you Marina shall we do a good old-fashioned everyone turn off their videos can we go to gallery view I don't know that I have open space as a video oh so Marina is logged in twice and one of our zoom guests is named open space ah okay thank you thank you see I see it now there we go this is the first okay for me here we go thank you Scott yep you can also take me away I don't need to be on screen necessarily but okay thanks for sticking through some technical difficulties like Kayla said my name is Marina and I'm based at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and just on the other screen right now you should be seeing a nighttime view of the New York City area which is where I'm based and I'm showing you this view using the open space software so kind of similar to what Ernie was talking about this is a data visualization software and it's a free open source program that's funded by NASA and developed out of the Natural History Museum where I work so it originally was developed as a planetarium software but it's scalable to all different platforms so from your laptop screen to a classroom projector all the way up to a planetarium dome and it takes all different kinds of data sets from NASA and visualizes them so you can interactively explore the universe so it'll take you from the surface of the earth all the way out to the cosmic microwave background which is essentially the edge of the universe but today we're going to be exploring the moon and I'm so excited to be here with you all to do that so now that we're kind of looking at the nighttime view of earth we're going to flip around and start to explore the moon so I'll take us over to the moon now and you're seeing a dark moon because you're seeing the moon as it would appear in the night sky tonight so it's in the waxing crescent face and it's cloudy here in New York so I can't see the moon tonight unfortunately but the fun thing about open space is that you can visualize it as it would appear in your sky but so we can better explore the surface I'm going to turn off the shading on the moon so the entire near side is now illuminated for us and this is going to make looking at all the features on its surface a little bit easier so one of the cool things about open space is that you can look at different kinds of data and you guys have already seen topographic data sets but I'm just going to show you one more so this is a topographic data set of the moon and so the brighter colors the greens and yellows correspond to higher altitude terrain and the blues and the purples correspond to lower altitude terrain so you'll see that the bottoms of the craters are always darker in color than the rims that's because they're lower in altitude so I can pan around the moon and now we're approaching the far side of the moon and you'll see earth come into view any second now right there and I'll just stop here briefly to show that the far side of the moon is much more cratered than the near side of the moon and so this topographic data set really emphasizes that so especially in teaching if you ever need to kind of go over more typical concepts that are easier to explain with visuals open space is a great tool to do that so I'll swing around to the near side again and take you down to the surface of the moon to explore the Apollo 17 landing site so I'm going to focus on the Taurus Littrow Valley which is where the Apollo 17 mission landed and you'll notice as I'm zooming in the data initially looks a little pixelated and this is because open space is continually pulling these data sets down over the web and rendering them in real time so depending on how big the data set that you're looking at is it could take some time to load but once it does you'll get the full detail of whatever data set you're hoping to look at so I'll zoom in here on the landing site of Apollo 17 and actually before I do that what I want to point out is that we have multiple different data sets layered on top of each other right here so we have the initial global data set of the moon that we're looking at and then we have a smaller scale USGS map and then an even smaller scale data set here and so that's another benefit of open space is that you can look at multiple data sets at the same time and toggle between them as you see fit so we're zooming down right now to the landing site of Apollo 17 and what you'll notice is the lunar module right there kind of in the center in the brighter area and we actually have a 3d model of it coming down and touching the surface you can change time in open space as well which is cool because any kind of time dependent phenomena that you wanted to show such as you know phases of the moon or the landing of the Apollo missions you can move through time and show that as well but I'm going to zoom down to the surface for now and show you guys right where the lunar module landed here in the center if you look really closely you can see the tracks made by the Apollo 17 rovers so lots of different data that it's integrating here and I'll show you one more cool thing that we have and that is a photogrammetry of boulders from the Apollo 17 excursions so I will show you guys station six so this is just the name of this particular area that the astronauts traveled to and what you'll notice is that they focused on this boulder right here which actually rolled down the hill above above this site and the Apollo astronauts took a bunch of photos of this boulder and from all different angles and so through post-processing we were able to combine all of these photos and create kind of a 3d perspective of the rock even though we don't necessarily have true 3d data oops overshot that a bit and what you'll notice because we're integrating a lot of different data sets right here is that the boulders this 3d structure is hovering over the actual surface terrain and that's just because you have different height maps and different color maps and so the two that I have turned on right now aren't in sync so that's why you're seeing a little bit of a an odd scene right here these rocks are not floating that's just an artifact of the software so you can explore these as much as you want there's also some other boulders that we have in the software and you can you know zoom right up to the center of these and look at the inclusions in the rocks if you're so inclined but yeah this is just I think one of the coolest things the software has is incorporating multidimensional data so I'm happy to take any questions if anybody has any but I really encourage you to explore this software if you're interested it's at openspaceproject.com and it's free to download and free to use you do probably have to have a pretty good graphics card to render all this data but um you have a little patience you can really really explore a lot so hope that was a little bit helpful and I am excited to be here with you all and thanks so much for having me that is so cool thank you Marina for showing us around open space there's a question in the chat about how big that moon boulder might have been ooh I would say probably the size of a small car yeah great yeah thanks my guess we need an astronaut for scale in there maybe can add that in wow cool thank you so much that was great so Ernie's creating all this great visualization and Marina's showing us cool ways to use it and anyone is able to run this with a good system you could we could be planetarians ourselves is that true absolutely yeah that's so cool thank you really in free time here next up we've got many of you know of astronomy picture of the day or apod for short we've got Robert Nemerhoff who's joining us from Michigan Tech University he's the principal investigator for apod along with Jerry Bonnell and um he's going to show us some amazing views of the moon from people who have taken images all over the world and Anessa as well of course take it away Robert thanks for joining us okay thank you Vivian thanks uh thanks for having me this um this is great um so the Observer of the Moon is just some best uh apod images so apod stands for um astronomy picture of the day which you can find at apod apod dot nasa dot gov so we've been around for quite a while since 95 every day we feature another image at this website address and we have a lot of good images and we're currently one of nasa's most popular sites so let's get to the moon images and what's this is this the moon it looks like the moon's got lots of craters it seems to be moon covered but uh kind of looks like my background but it's not the moon it is mercury so there's lots of cratered things in our solar system moons and planets and so mercury is one of them it's a lot hotter in our moon it's almost it's a little bit bigger than our moon but not much bigger and so the messenger nasa's messenger satellite took this um 10 15 years ago but exciting news just this month that'd be colombo uh collaboration between um japan and europe just zoomed by mercury again and it will eventually return and orbit the first planet out from the sun okay so if that's not the moon is this the moon this is not the moon we know how can the moon look like this that's because this isn't our moon no so which planet does this moon orbit you can just shout that out if it's good um people around you will want to know uh make sure your neighbors can hear you um what what's what a little bit louder okay yeah that's right it's Saturn's moon iapetus and it's sometimes called a painted moon what we're seeing is the trailing hemisphere as it goes around um uh goes around Saturn and the leading hemisphere is a little bit unusual more than a little bit unusual it's darkest coal it's it it's dark brown and there's some kind of carbonaceous material there and this is the more lighter material much different in brightness that trails it this is the trail mostly the trailing hemisphere here you see down here a big um big crater so let's keep looking for the moon oh there's our moon did you see the moon find the moon this is an apod on you can find all these images on this starting picture today the day you find them we have an archive of all of our images you just go to the july 11 2021 although it appeared previously so this was taken from this picture of the moon is taken from Colorado so if you think the moon is on the left raise your left hand if you think the moon is on the right raise your right hand if you think the moon is in the center raise your center hand i don't know how that works but um so i'll raise both hands there you go and so the answer is drum roll please it's right here now how come the moon ac is brighter in this moon because this moon was taken during a total lunar eclipse for one thing and another thing it was taken just as the sun was rising so it's a full moon the sun is just rising and illuminating the air so there's a lot of air glow here also there's a lot of attenuation due to the earth's atmosphere so even the full moon isn't as bright as we remember it and sometimes you have to look at it the photographer who took this Jimmy Westlake uh said that he knew where it was when he took the picture and then when he looked at it he couldn't find it he knew even knowing where it was he couldn't find it but if you put your eye right up against your monitor or your phone you can see it put it right up there it's okay people aren't watching okay good okay is this our moon and left left hand is um your left hand is yes your right hand is no and the answer is yes it is our moon but it is not the what you usually see it is the moon from zand eight this picture was taken in 1970 by the soviet union spacecraft which zand eight which went around the moon and took film pictures came back to earth and this is one of those film pictures that was developed so um this is meroriental here and there's some maria which are says which means latin for ocean but but it's not seized they're not seized they're dry and you can see the highlands that we just saw last uh last lecture are the far side of the moon are much higher and and lighter than the maria and so we had seen the far side of the moon before but this really brings it into into focus how cool it is okay so here's another moon this is uh the standard moon that you might see uh so here you can try to find not the moon itself but the man in the moon as we heard last hour there was more than the man in the moon there's a fox in the moon which i had never heard before i heard of the woman in the moon and there was actually a couple rabbits in the moon and many cultures have a lot of moon myths which is beautiful in the us one of the favorite moon myths is the man in the moon which could just be a person in the moon uh but it's known as the man of the moon that's the search topic you would use if you went on google so can you find the man in the moon everyone's seen it but do you know where it is and so here's one one there's many ways of doing it but here's one way of doing it you take these mara and they're the eyes and put the nose this is the mouth so if the moon is at the right orientation which depends on your hemisphere and latitude and actually time of night but if so then you can find the man in the moon but there's actually two people in the moon here the other one is this guy right here uh who's taking uh he's looking at an image of uh through his telescope at the moon behind it so when you observe the moon you can see the man in the moon and you can look through a telescope and see fine details on the moon okay so this is the moon not a moon you might be familiar with so this person who took this moon Brent McKeon in manitoba he was gone to work one morning and he went outside and he looked up where the moon would be and this is what he saw and so he was late to work because he just couldn't believe it fortunately in our era of uh smartphones he was able to take a picture of it so what we see is the lunar halo in the center and we see moon dogs on either side and we see tangent arcs on top and bottom and circles caused by floating ice crystals that flitter down most of this and so when you look through ice crystals these ice crystals can reflect certain things and you can see really cool stuff and so this is a really great image a colorful image of moon too so when he then drove to work almost all this disappeared within a few minutes and you could see only one of the moon dogs but if you see this take out your camera and take a picture and if you want to send a task we'd be happy to see it okay this is a really close up of the moon it's hard to get this from your backyard in fact the best way to get this is to go to the moon so that's what humanity did and this was taken in 1969 and this is a picture of the first person on the m