Good morning. Good morning. We're back at home getting stuff done Running into town picking up materials Going back home realizing you forgot some materials going back into town getting more materials This is ridiculous already, and I know that I'm known for being a little bit forgetful at home like you know But it is just kicked into overdrive I guess cuz I got a lot of projects to do and I'm trying to get them all done this Time home at home. It's part of being a truck driver. You know, you're only at home a certain amount of time You gotta get a lot of stuff and everything done like everyone else gets you know evenings and weekends to get their stuff done Me I only get the days that I'm at home to get everything done when I'm on the road Just obviously I can't Get any of that done so We're getting our master bedroom all finished up And I want to get that already this time at home So we went and bought the flooring today. I went and bought paint rollers paint and Britt was with me We went into town. We got all this stuff. We went home. We're so happy We're like yeah, we got this stuff and a little bit stressed out But well at least we got all our stuff and I realize We don't got all the stuff And she had to go to work and I was supposed to be working in the room there all day today But no, I'm gonna spend my day going back into town getting more stuff You know didn't sleep well last night because I knew I had a lot of work to get done while I'm at home now And I'm sitting there looking at the roof, you know, like hey am I gonna have enough time to get things done? What about this? What about this? Oh, I forgot about this. I got to do this too Okay, this doesn't have to get done But if I don't do that then this won't get done. So yes, I have to get that done How am I gonna get this done if I don't do that? So I have to do that But in order to do that I have to do this first My brain just spray spins a million miles a minute, right? And then eventually I get to working and once I get to the job and to working Stress goes away right because work is a stress relief to me thinking about work is stressful Actual work Fixes it. So when I'm getting stuff done, I'm being productive That's when I feel good about myself, I don't like just sitting around doing nothing I don't like just sitting around thinking of all the things that need to get done and getting nothing done So I didn't sleep much last night. I just got up and wandered around for a bit And I ended up falling asleep at like six in the morning or something I slept till 10 and then I wake up. I'm like, oh great the whole morning's gone. Could have been working this whole time I'm a mess. Oh boy We're gonna be okay. We're having fun But we're gonna be having fun as soon as I get my stuff that I need gotta go get more stuff So what we're doing is we redry while the room, right? We were gonna reframe it We were gonna change it all around Change that we just decided to redry while the whole room put a new flooring in the baseboards and crown molding in It's gonna look really nice. The ensuite's gonna have a new floor. I think too And getting a new tub in there tub surround Everything's gonna be freshly painted. Host is gonna look great, right? We got the mighty Steinback traffic holding us up here now. I need a trailer like this I like this trailer beside me on the right nice dump trailer like that That would be handy that would look really nice hooked up to my truck Much better than that Ford That's nice. I Can make use of that.  I'm stressed out. I'm always stressed out. That's just me. I'm just a stress bag I never used to be never used to be But here we are living the dream Sometimes I just feel a little overwhelmed and I like to just vent to my camera. So I Know I can hear your comments already saying you just need to chill just calm down. I know I know but Sometimes in those moments. I like to vent to the camera. I'm sure it's a little relatable to a lot of you We all go through this. I'm not saying I'm unique in this Overwhelmingness That's just life, right? That's just life. Maybe some of the young kids watch my video be like, oh, wow I didn't know life like was like that after school. Oh, you think you're stressed out in school now. Whoa You just wait you just wait. Oh, it gets better. It gets better You wait until you have thousands and thousands of bills riding on your back every month Gotta make sure you don't miss one of them, you know, gotta keep track of everything all of them There's no mom and dad around to, you know, catch you when you fall I know my parents would probably try to help me out, but I refuse help And let's say absolutely needed help is my absolute last resort to ask someone for help Maybe I've got a little bit too much pride. Maybe I'm very stubborn. I like to think of myself as just very independent. I Want to do it on my own So that's the way I've been feeling this morning, but it'll get better. Don't worry. Don't worry. I'll get home I'm here at the EG Penner here in Steinbeck get picking up some materials. It'll get better as soon as I get home I'll get in the room there. I'll start getting stuff done as soon as I get my first little Piece of project done. I'll feel a hundred percent better.  I know you do everyone does I just have a camera filming me talk to myself He also drives a Ford It's probably jealous. That's probably why he's looking at me probably looking. Oh, I wish I was driving a Chevy Totally understand bud totally should have thought of that before he bought a Ford Now you got to live with yourself. I don't know how you do it, man Come on bud.  No, I'm gonna go then it was your turn over there, mr. Ford Fine, I'll take your turn No, it's gonna go after you. No, I insist after you. No, I insist after you No, no, no, no after you Where to go where to go I'm on the lumber side. I need to go to the other side and you pick up my flooring $1,100 For flooring For one bedroom Where's this guy going? Where's this guy going? I'm sorry, but I don't know what I'm doing $1,100 Whoo, that better be golden flooring like it seriously better be made of gold And we got the cheap stuff. I thought well, not the cheapest of the cheap. It's like waterproof Uh laminate flooring Clicks together We got the stuff that's pretty easy to lay down because I don't want to spend like three days Figuring out how to put the floor in so we got the we got the easier stuff to put in. That's what I mean Okay, Dina Like all We're just renovating one room and I'm thinking of my love man. This is expensive. What am I building a house? I think it would have been I think it would have been cheaper just to build a whole new house renovating one room There isn't Come on It just don't give us a break Oh, man I think I'm gonna back up to this door here. There's door on the right That's where uh, my stuff is supposed to be waiting for me Lovely lovely. Yeah, I play it up a little bit for the vlog. I'm not actually that That crazy.  Okay, maybe I'm a I'm a lot crazy. Okay But that's why you watch me, right? I'm a very weird guy There she is 15 packs That right there is $1,100 And that's all we'll say of that $1,100 Am I told you that yet?  It's gotta be done. It's gotta be done Life is expensive children. Are you listening? You don't know the half of all the things your parents do To keep a roof over your head a floor under your feet Food in the fridge for you be thankful for your parents. I hope you got good parents I was very fortunate to be it to grow up with two very good parents And I understand that not everyone else is as fortunate But uh, you know Parents are pretty awesome. They do a lot. I had no idea the expensive things in life You know, I got a buddy. He's got three kids He says like almost 1500 bucks a month to feed them like three teenage kids Like $12, $1500 to feed them every month Whoo something to look forward to But you never regret it you never regret it. It's always worth it Speaking of parenthood, britain and I have No good news to share with you yet Still waiting for god to give us a little bundle of joy Thank you to all you who are praying for us and sending good thoughts our way here We appreciate it. It's uh It's been a journey and since this whole virus has has popped into the world from china Uh, everything's been shut down including our fertility clinic and uh Our fertility clinic is supposed to be open for appointments But there's only one fertility clinic in all of manitoba the whole province, right? And they aren't We've never had very good customer service there. It's not covered by our medicare So it's not covered by our free health care. We pay for it. It's $600 a month Speaking of money everything's expensive $600 a month And we get better service from our free health care doctors When we're Anyway, that's a different story for a different time We haven't been happy with the service from there, but this month they were supposed to be open And so when the time comes around brit gives them a call and she goes on these uh Fertility meds and stuff and then when the time comes we both go in there and uh, you know, they They drop the boys off at the finish line. That's iui And they were supposed to do that this month, but they don't do phone calls They don't do in-person appointments right now. They do phone Email not even phone calls email. So brit emailed them and said k. I need to hear from you guys in the next three days Or we'll have to wait a whole another month So emailed them no response back still not it's been weeks So Wouldn't know what's going on. We haven't been able to get into the fertility clinic Maybe next month. It's been a bit of a frustrating journey there as well, but As you've been gathering from this entire vlog all of life is frustrating and stressful But uh, you got to be able to manage it. All right Just because life is stressful doesn't mean that you have to turn into a ball of anxiety and just Shrivel up on the floor and shake right you got to learn how to deal with this and as you grow older you learn that It's a fact that you just got to deal with Lots of stuff going on all the time Our lives go a mile a minute And it would be so nice if there was 48 hours in one day because each day There's not enough hours in a day to get stuff done But i'm not complaining not complaining Just trying to be entertaining here for you guys Because I don't really have anything else to talk about today. We'll go to the house and we'll uh, we'll start working on that room Like I said, that'll make me feel a lot better now that we got our flooring Did I say it's $1,100 for one room? I think I said that already didn't I just want that to soak in You can tell I don't do this for a living or that I don't do flooring often right and drywall and all this stuff Because I had no idea how expensive this stuff was I went in there like yeah, probably like what two or three hundred bucks Gives me the bill $1,100 Huh? Excuse me. No, I would like a cheaper one Shows me the cheaper one. No, okay. I better go with the better one I wanted to last more than six months Oh the life of trucker josh I feel that I must be kind of an interesting guy to watch from the outside view in because Things just happen to me all the time I keep forgetting things weird things go on. I'm a weird guy to begin with I'm glad I started filming all this to document it because I don't think anyone would believe me if I told them I am a strange one So thank god they still had those pieces there that I forgot. I told you that right I forgot our uh We bought a Long painting sticks with rollers and I forgot them in the yard back there when I was loading This stuff from this morning. Thank god. They were still sitting right where I put them down I told myself don't forget these here josh And then I drove away and forgot them there So they were there now and Nobody questioned me wondering why I was taking them. I said I paid for them before and they remembered me. Thank goodness Otherwise they'd make me pay for them again What are you doing? Why are you stopping right in the middle of the road little lady? She still stopped there What in the world? But no, I'm not actually Always like this. I'm more of a quiet guy. Believe it or not if you meet me in person I think I keep most of this bottled up and then I just release it all to the camera Britt knows me like that. She knows me, but most people probably think I'm just this quiet guy in the corner I watch people right and before I become comfortable talking and hanging out with people I usually sit back and I watch them for a while I get to know what who they are what they're like what they'd what they like to talk about So that when I actually go and engage with them I have something to talk about with them and there's no awkward silence isn't right Right, so I was like, oh, this is probably something that they're into. This is what they're interested. Let's talk about this I I think it's just being observant. I observe first and then I go in for the for the talking When I'm on the camera, there's no one here There's you, but I don't see you you see me. I don't see you So I I guess I can just talk to you like we're best buddies I've been doing this for too long. I think Don't worry. I don't plan on stopping anytime soon. I think I rely on this. It's my fix It's the way I get my opinions and my ideas out to the world And I've made a lot of really good friends through my youtube channel Like all of my groomsmen at my wedding we're all from youtube, aren't I? Pretty sure A lot of my good friends I've made like I made a lot of new a lot of good friends without youtube But you know I've met a lot of people through this and And all of you find people out there that I haven't even met yet You're all fine great people as well Just haven't had the privilege of meeting you yet You know, I'm already feeling better that I picked up the flooring Because I know I'm getting stuff done now. I'm bringing it to the house That's one step getting one step done. It'll be at the house now. Now. I don't have to go get it later It's it's going to be there. I was going to go in to pick it up tomorrow But since I forgot that paint roller I had to go back today anyway She's a professional painter. She's done it for a living before she just had a baby So she'll bring her baby down. You can see the baby and she can Bless us with her skills of painting Because I'll do as much as I can myself But it'll just be nice having someone there that I know knows what they're doing And can do it quickly and efficiently and help us So that's really nice of them. Really nice. Maybe your fiancee Jared will come out as well He's an awesome guy to hang out with. He's an electrician I don't need any electric work done this time though, but I wouldn't mind a buddy to hang out with It's for sure On saturday, we're going out for brit's birthday. It's going to be rolling tubing down the river I'm taking you guys with because that's going to be fun And on sunday, we're going to see a swinging bridge with my family So we're going out with her family saturday my family sunday and then monday is back to work at the house And then so far I've made myself available for tuesday I might need to stretch that to wednesday or thursday depending on how long it takes to get this house done I want it done Completo finito fini No more No more work to be done. I'm tired of having a construction zone in our house And I've got the motivation now. It's time to put it to put it to use filming much Well, I've been at home, but I've been at home for a few days. We've been very busy. Yesterday. We went tubing Down the river in st. Molo. That was fun three times Today we're going to visit uh My parents campsite my family's getting together there And apparently we're going to go see some kind of swinging bridge or something This is a pressure washer we're borrowing from mom and dad to wash the outside of our house Because it needs it my truck too at the same time So I think we're about to go to the beach here I got a little uh a little tiny swimming pond here that we can all go to and hang out at I'm looking forward to it Okay Going to the beach so if you made it through that whole vlog you're a pretty hardcore trucker josh viewer I appreciate it. I did just a lot of talking in my truck in this one, but that's The way it turned out that's the way it was. I've had a lot of requests though for more home time footage and uh Not just from you guys from my family and my wife as well They're saying why don't you film at home anymore?  They don't want to be a part of it and uh They've made that clear like I said, so I got a little confused Is it well, maybe it's best if I just don't film at home as much I just film on the road more and it doesn't bother anybody that way It's just me and diesel in here all the time But now everybody's telling me why don't you film at home anymore? Like we miss being a part of it So I'm going to start doing that more often Daily vlogs at home as well. I've sort of just been doing vlogs like this sort of like a collection of Moments from here and moments from there. I didn't want to show you the full renovation yet We did get it done, but it wasn't done by the time I left britt and her stepmom synthia Finished after I left It was a huge collective effort from ashley britt's cousin from my mom and dad From britt's stepmom and mom All of them helped us getting this project of ours done that we're working on right now and uh Turned out really well, but I couldn't include it in this vlog because it wasn't done Then yes the next time I go home. I'll give you the tour and uh I got to finish up a few little finishing touches by when I get home too, but Yeah, it was a lot of work, but It got done That's all I can tell you. I don't know what else to tell you. So yeah, uh The next video will be us going back on the road and next time I'm home I'll make more of an effort to include my home time in my storyline here on my vlog as well because that seems to be what everybody wants So I can't show everybody at home Not everybody in my life at home wants to be on youtube and that's totally up to them. That's uh It's totally cool. All they got to do is tell me they don't want to be a part of it and That's fine, but pretty much everybody else does so right diesel more home time videos From now on how about that? I'll see you guys tomorrow. Thanks for watching We'll get back to trucking in the next vlog


Well, so we're gonna go ahead and get started once again. If you are part of our Zoom webinar, be sure to set your chat to everyone, not just hosts and panelists, and make sure that you've shared your hello. So thank you, Anna. And again, for those on Zoom, if you have a question, please feel free to use the Q&A window in the menu on the bottom of your Zoom screen. And you can also send any troubleshooting questions or any general questions to us at nightskyinfoatastrosociety.org. And welcome once again to the December Night Sky Network webinar from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in California. Tonight, we have Dr. Robert Nemeroff from the Astronomy Picture of the Day. And this is going to be Astronomy Picture of the Day 2023 Highlights. And so along with Jerry Bonnell, Dr. Robert Nemeroff has written, coordinated and edited NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day since 1995. Astronomy Picture of the Day archive contains the largest collection of annotated astronomical images on the internet. And Dr. Nemeroff is a professor of physics at Michigan Tech. He worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland before coming to Michigan Tech. He is perhaps best known scientifically for papers predicting, usually among others, several recovered microlensing phenomena and papers showing, usually among others, that gamma ray bursts were consistent with occurring at cosmological distances. He led a group that developed and deployed the first online fish-eye night sky monitor called ComCams, deploying later models to most major astronomical observatories. He has published as first author, oh, excuse me, he has published as first author and referred for every major journal in astronomy and astrophysics. His current research includes trying to limit attributes of our universe with distant gamma ray bursts and investigating the use of relativistic illumination fronts to orient astronomical nebulae. I apologize, I stumbled through that. But welcome nonetheless to Dr. Robert Nemeroff. Thank you very much. Okay, so I'll begin. I'm going to try to share my screen here. You might get a slight shock. So let's see, there. So I think I'm sharing my screen. So if that's not happening, please somebody tell me. I wanna, okay, so. We can see it. Okay, good. So official title, actually Viz idea of Vivian. So postcards from the universe 2023 to the astronomy picture of the day. So I am Robert J. Nemeroff and my colleague in creating astronomy picture of the day is Jerry T. Benow, but I'm not him. I'm usually just me. So I'm at Michigan Tech in northern part of Michigan. He's at NASA Goddard, but is through the University of Maryland. So this is for the night sky network in this astronomical science of Pacific and NASA. Okay, so not everybody knows what astronomy picture of the day is. So here's my what's APOD slide. So you can go there with just APOD.nasa.gov. And as was, as Kat said, we started in 1995 and over the 28 years, we've become one of NASA's most popular science websites. And we currently do over a million page views per day. Typically when we check our log files every university accesses APOD every day. And we're translated by volunteers into 20 world languages. And we have presence on most major social media sites. So if you're in Facebook, you can find us there, for example, Instagram too. Okay, so here we go. So I'm gonna start this year with the last year sort of. So reviewing December from last year. So in December, 2022, the Artemis I mission was in flight. And in fact, it was day 13 of the Artemis mission. And it was on the far side of the moon from Earth. And here you can see a really cool image. You can see not only both NASA logos, the meatball and the worm, but you can see two major objects of which you might be familiar. This is the Earth. I hope you can see my cursor. This is the moon. And since it's closer to the moon, the moon looks larger, but actually we know if the earth is larger. So the moon looks pretty small because the loop was pretty, pretty big. I went around the moon. So there's going to be Artemis II and III, and eventually NASA will put more people on the moon in the next couple of years. There's, NASA's not the only game in town anymore as there are other nations that do this and there are even other companies that have aspirations of doing this in the near future. You can fill in who you think they might be. All right, so here's a really cool image that was submitted to us. This is one of these amazing landscape images. So this ran, so all of these, you can see, you can see all of these as much as you want. You can just go to the APOT archive, and which has all of our images going back for 28 years. And this, you can look for December 13 in 2022, and you can just stare at this all night or until someone objects. So this is not a single image. This was a series of images all taken from, with the same camera and from the same location consecutively. So if your eyes were really good enough and you were lucky enough, you could see this, but the Aurora would be much fainter and the band of the Milky Way might be harder to pick out. But this is a really cool image. So here's the astrophotographer and he in this case is illuminating the foreground, which is in Lofoten, Norway, which is a very interesting rocky foreground. So this Aurora has two arcs to it. A meteor was caught in one of the shots. There are some bright stars, the big dippers up here, Vegas here, there's a planet, Jupiter's here, the Andromeda galaxy is here. So these landscape retrospectives are just really cool and a lot of astrophotographers, as you might know, go to some effort to put these together and we do run these and we think they're great. Okay, this was taken during the 2022 Geminids meteor shower. And these are the Mittens, these are Utah, these are plugs of volcanic plugs from the distant past. So this is Castor and Pollux in Gemini. So the meteors appear to come from the constellation Gemini and you can see an image of the many images of the Geminids from this year, one by looking behind me. So that's from this year and we'll get to that later. So these were not all seen at the same time. So this is a type of time lapse where the astrophotographer will catch individual meteors and then add them together to show where the radiant might be. And so these are educational. Many times we're happy to see images like this because even though you have to de-rotate the night sky, it shows something very interesting and something very educational at the same time. All right, so we don't only run straight images, sometimes we run something that is so interesting and even if it's like a table or a figure, we're gonna run that. So this is another one we ran. This was in January, so we've moved into 2023. So the theme is this year. And this is just a periodic table and most people have seen periodic tables in school. But here's one that's coded a little differently. This periodic table tells you where these elements have come from. So for instance, there's hydrogen. So you might think, well, I don't have any hydrogen in me but you do if you're made of water and pretty much everybody watching this has a lot of water in them. That's just the way it is. So the hydrogen in the water in you came from the big van. And there's lots of other elements, some of which are needed for life. And you can just sort of look up there. Like carbon comes from dying low mass stars mostly but a little bit comes from exploding massive stars. So you can find your favorite element and where it came from. But one thing that this table doesn't really communicate as much as it could is that some are, astronomy is a frontier of trying to understand what's going on. It's not a book of knowledge that you read from. Astronomy is a frontier where you is continually being explored or continually finding out new things. So for instance, copper, 29, we don't really know completely exactly where all the copper comes from. And a lot of it's in wiring. Some of it's in the pipes in your house but we don't know the ultimate origin of that. It's probably having to do with exploding white glories and exploding massive stars, the fraction of which we don't know. Some of it might be emerging neutron stars. So this is one of the frontiers, the many frontiers that exist in observational and research astrophysics. Okay, so our sun went through a very deep minimum which meant that its surface was really boring a couple of years ago. A few years ago there were very few sunspots who were active regions. But right now our sun is unusually active, more active than it should be in this part of the solar cycle. Our sun is moving towards solar maximum in 2025. But along the way, even now, there's all kinds of filaments and active regions and this is a sunspot region here. So why is it so increased? Why is it so active? So we don't really know that. So even our brightest star has mysteries that we don't know. One good thing about our sun is even though it undergoes a 22 year cycle of magnetism, but every 11 years it flips, the amount of light that changes during this solar cycle is really not that different. So the billions of years of relative constancy has allowed, we think, enabled life to evolve on earth along with many other things. But we're currently unsure how active our sun will become in the next year or so. And we're constantly watching it. One interesting thing about the active sun is it throws off more flares and frontal mass ejections which thread their way through the magnetic field of the solar system and hit the magnetosphere of the earth and many of them come down usually toward the north and will create aurora better seen. So we could be in and we already are in for an increasingly interesting aurora season. And some of these aurora even a couple of months ago were visible as far south as Oklahoma, I think. And Spain, APOD was sent even some images from Spain that had aurora. So even if you live in San Francisco or almost anywhere in the continental of USA, you might have a shot at seeing aurora, but you gotta go to dark skies to see it. Okay, so one of the bright comments over the past year was kind of ZTF, which stands for Zicky's Wiki Transient Facility, which is a camera which monitors the sky. So this comet was just barely visible with the unaided eye, but here it was caught with a camera. So with a camera, you can integrate longer. Your eye will only integrate for about 10th of a second or so, maybe a little bit longer, but here you can keep the shutter open and accumulating photons for minutes. And so this comet is showing an eye on tail and a dust tail and it's shown over Yosemite Falls. And so here, the caption of the APOD, all APODs have a caption that tries to explain things and have links into the deeper web. So this comet is falling around the sun in a very elliptical orbit and this waterfall is falling toward the Earth. So we tried, actually I happened to write this caption, tried to show the commonality of gravity in causing a lot of what's seen. All right, so we live in the era, as you might know, of artificial intelligence. So this was the APOD that ran on January 24th in 2023. It was created by a deep AI. So the web space telescope would be able to get new data on an exoplanet system. It did not take this picture. This is not a photograph. This is an illustration. So based on eclipses of this nearby planet to its reddish star, small reddish star, one could get, estimate what the surface of this planet is like. So what I did in this case is I opened up an artificial intelligence generative image engine and I started feeding it terms about being close into its star and what it might look like there. And it spat back to me something that was completely unacceptable. It had all kinds of vegetation. And so I had to be more specific. I said, no, no, no, no, it's not. It's too close. I can't imagine that there's this kind of vegetation on that planet. So I said, what about lava flows? Put in some lava flows.  So one of the cool things about artificial intelligence is that it allows you to imagine things that you can't actually see. So we don't have a probe on the surface of this planet, the sex or planet newly discovered and newly, new data on the sex or planet. But now we can make a better estimate of what it might look like from there relatively quickly too. After this was published, I got into discussion with people at NASA who realized that there was a problem, a problem that I didn't estimate. So we're very careful with copyrights at APOD, but it turns out that this engine was trained with images that might have been copyrighted. So after we thought about this for a little bit, we actually had to pull this image. So this image you can't find. This is in general. So because it might have been trained with images that we shouldn't, but generative AI is undergoing lots of interesting revolutions. So new generative AI is going to be trained with images that are better defined image sets that we can use. So we're hopeful that in the next couple of years or maybe even this coming year in 2024, we'll be able to have generative AI images and redo this in a better way. So during 2023, there was a dramatic, in some sense, conjunction between Venus and Jupiter where they came together on the sky. So here we see successive days and the brighter one is Venus and the dimmer one is Jupiter and they got closer and closer. And one of the days there was a crescent moon that went flying by and they're not flying by. I mean, that night you would just look at it, it would just be sitting there, but the next night it'd be gone. And so they got quite close together and so this is actually quite interesting because when you would go out at sunrise, you would really notice this if you happen to look toward the east, the sun just for the sunrise, you'd say, wow, what are those two bright spots over there? And so here we were sent something from Germany that you can see the way people would, so this is a potential, this was a family, actual family and somebody's looking through a telescope and I'm not really sure because probably the telescope field of view might be too small to, well, these two are about separated by the diameter so maybe they could see that. And so through the telescope, you could see the phase of Venus and you could probably see cloud bands on Jupiter, but with just your unaided eye, so unaided eye events are really cool. You could just go out and look and you can see two of the brightest spots on the sky right near each other. So we got sent a lot of cool images for this and this is just one of the coolest ones. So we live in a golden age where spacecraft are being sent around many different planets in the solar system and asteroids in the solar system. So we still have Juno that's doing long elliptical loops around Jupiter. And so when it comes near the planet, it takes pictures and it also has lots of science goals, one of which is trying to find out the magnetic field of Jupiter and more detailed which we're finding it's a very complicated magnetic field more complicated than people were guessing. We're trying to find out if Jupiter has a solid core and although the jury's still out on that, it looks like there's several layers to the core. So that's still being studied. But here's one of the really cool pictures that came in from Juno as it swooped past Jupiter this past year. Here you can see lots of swirly clouds and the Earth would probably fit inside this big white oval. Typically the darker ones are lower. So it actually does dip into the atmospheric deck of Jupiter and the lighter ones are higher. But we just really liked this picture because it was first, you just really got a feeling for looking across Jupiter. It was really not just a circular planet with bands. It really had cool 3D structure with some of this. Okay, so I don't know how to pronounce this. This is Nyan Du possibly in the Milky Way. So one of the things that Western society is better realizing more recently is that there are stories of the night sky that go back generations at almost every place you can think. The native cultures all around the Earth have stories of the night sky. And the Western world has sort of adopted mostly the Greek mythology of the night sky, which is great. And the International Astronomical Union has now sanctioned constellations to be named by typically the Greek legends. But many parts of the sky have their own legends. And I think it's important to record those and remember those and consider them to be as important, if not more important, than the ones that are internationally recognized. It's good to have an international standard because then people in different cultures can talk about the same things. But the individual cultures themselves just have fascinating stories that are passed down through generations. So here we see a statue of a woman from Uruguay who was fought against colonization. And one thing that was popular in this culture in the Uruguayan culture of over 100 each years is that this band of the Milky Way Galaxy, which we just consider to be part of the band of the Milky Way Galaxy, in this culture is actually a big bird. And so now it's hard for me to look at this without saying, hey, yeah, that's kind of like a big bird. It's sort of like seeing a person in the moon. And in Western culture, it's usually a man in the moon. There's also a rabbit in the moon and different kinds of things in the moon of different cultures, but it's just really cool. So you can find a link about this and learn about the Nandu in the Milky Way on the June 20th APOD, but there's also a lot more information and in local cultures around. Okay, so this is from the Sky Survey. So this is a SDS, a Slow and Digital Sky Survey. So this has been going on for 20 years. So the Slow and Digital Sky Survey just piled the sky and looked at many different galaxies and quasars. So this is the nearby galaxies are here coded in the covers and the colors are pretty good because as you go further out from us and here we have redshift over on the left, you find out that galaxies are more and more redshifted. Now they don't necessarily appear more red although they do a little bit, but as you go out the galaxies are more and more redshifted but then the Sloan found and we knew otherwise, you start running into, you can't really see the outlying galaxies. You see the centers of the galaxies, particularly when they're active and that becomes active guy to new guy and they are mostly more blue and ultraviolet. So here we see the blue and ultraviolet as we get out to redshifts of one and two very deep into the universe. So you hear the look back time on the right and eventually even the centers of these galaxies are fading into the red. And so you see redshift in two ways. And so this map of the observable universe was released in 2023 and you can see the microwave background. So another aspect of artificial intelligence that affects our lives is this is a famous picture taken in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon. So Neil Armstrong took a picture of Buzz Aldrin which is seen over here but with modern artificial intelligence techniques this can be reversed, this visor can be reversed and here we can see Neil Armstrong on the moon taking a picture. So in a sense this is a selfie from the moon in 1969. And you can see some of the experiments that were set up and you can see the lunar module and it's just really cool that how increased computing power and artificial intelligence is affecting even the astronomy imagery that we see and can appreciate. So the web space telescope is up there and it's taken great images, particularly the infrared although the web space telescope does go into the orange. So it does see a little bit of visible in the red and orange range but some people are sending in images that are composites between ground-based telescopes which this is not, maybe a little bit and the Hubble space telescope which goes into the ultraviolet and the web space telescope which is bigger than Hubble but is more toward the infrared. So here we see it's somewhat image processed, the ring nebula which you can see with your backyard telescope from a dark occasion but you can't see it like this. So this is a planetary nebula so our sun will be throwing off its outer layers and might make a little bit look a little bit like this. The central white dwarf is in here, I think it's this one and there's just tremendous detail here most of which is understood but some of which is not and so we're still researching even one of the most brightest nebulas you can see with your backyard telescope. The ring nebula from Hubble and web is just spectacular for me to look at. So there was another bright comment that got just to the edge of naked eye unaided eye visibility in 2023 this was toward the just a few months ago comet Nishimura and here you can see a deep camera image and you can see the eye on tail and you can see the bright green coma. So now and maybe every year there is a comet that gets to the edge of unaided eye visibility and if we're lucky it gets much brighter. So we've been lucky in our run of APOD over the past 20 years so we're able to have some that were really bright and just were spectacular to go outside and see. This one was more of a camera comet but if you had a good camera and you knew where to look usually in your sunrise or sunset you could get some really good images and you could just about make it out even without your camera. Here's another image taken just before sunrise and here you can see the very bright venus and you can see the long tail Nado which is visible with the unaided eye of comet Nishimura, okay. So JWST, James Webb Space Telescope is just doing great observations of local planets of stars in the deep universe of exoplanets. So here is a star forming, a star that's forming and the star is forming inside this dusk disk here but along the way it's shooting out jets and these jets are visible in the infrared and in the red and this high resolution image from JWST really captures this well. And one question is do all stars that form go through a jet forming phase? And you know, we're not really sure because we only see, we can't watch a star all during that phase because it just takes too long but here we can see the jets that are formed from this Fermi-Karrow object number 211 and you can see different shells of moving out from the condensing gas along the poles are colliding with each other and creating quite a glow. So in a thousand years, couple thousand years, 10,000 years this should look somewhat different. This will change on the time scale of thousands of years. Okay, so this is Osiris Rex as you might know more than a year ago bumped into asteroid Bennu and Bennu is an asteroid that goes near the Earth and collected a sample.  Here it is sitting on the Utah desert before it was collected. So we're really interested in what Bennu is. Does it have a lot of carbon in its soil? So we don't really know. Does it have some unusual elemental mix? Maybe we can mine nearby asteroids and find unusual elements or valuable elements there which we couldn't mine in the short term but maybe in the long term we could. Maybe we could learn about carbon that then fell to Earth from other asteroids and comets and maybe help seed or help life develop on Earth or Mars. So this is all we're gonna learn about this as the samples from Bennu are analyzed in many laboratories across not only the US but in Europe. Ah, so this is an interesting one. So as we, in April, October, six, 2023 was the 100th year anniversary of a very interesting discovery on a glass plate. So this is the glass plate and the person who discovered this was Edwin Hubble and this resolved the Curtis-Chapley debate. The Curtis-Chapley debate was either the spiral nebula that we see out there. We see many times at that point they saw many types of nebula but the spiral nebula like the Andromeda nebula was that just gas or was it actually another galaxy like our own home Milky Way galaxy? And a hundred years ago, people didn't know. There was a big debate, the astronomical community was split and that's why there was the famous Curtis-Chapley debate and where people debated different sides of that. And then finally, on October 6th, 1923, Edwin Hubble was looking at glass slides from the 100 meter, 100 foot telescope on Paramar and he wrote VAR because he saw a spot in this nebula that changed its brightness and it was a variable star. And if it's a dim variable star and the variability tells you its actual brightness or estimate of it, then it had to mean that this Andromeda galaxy was actually a galaxy composed of stars like our Milky Way. And so only a hundred years ago, did we really appreciate that there's this vast universe out there filled with galaxies. And since then, all these galaxies in the discovery of the distant universe like the Sonjital sky survey slide and all the images we're seeing from Hubble and James Webb and others, it's just there are only a recent knowledge. Humanities, there are people alive today who were alive when it wasn't really well known that our galaxy was one of many galaxies in a vast universe. And this was the slide that made a big difference. So there was a annual eclipse of the sun in 2023. This presages the big total eclipse of the sun that will move across the United States on April 8th. And the Night Sky Network and the Astronautics Society of the Pacific is if you wanna be involved in that, please look at their literature because you can be involved in that. And if you go to the right place, you will see a total eclipse of the sun. If you stay right where you are, you will see a partially eclipse of the sun. This was an annual eclipse of the sun in October that you had to be in the right place to see an annual eclipse or you would see also from the US you would see a partial eclipse. But to see this eclipse, even the partial eclipse, and here you can see the annual eclipse, you didn't necessarily have to look up to see the moon in front of the sun. You could look down and see that light going through breaks in trees or you could actually do this with your hand and make little openings that would then create little spots on the ground. But those spots aren't really spots. Those spots are pinhole cameras, pinhole lenses where you can see many images of the moon in front of the sun and here you see many of them. And here you can actually see the outline of the tree. So we were hoping to get a really cool image on that day so we could, on the day of the annual eclipse, we could run a cool image the next day and we did. So this was that image and it was really cool and it was pretty popular, but not as popular as the next day's image. So this one I was a little skeptical of when it first came in and I had to do some background checking.  So these two people along with a third, the person taking the image, did a lot of investigations to where they could take some really cool images where they could be silhouetted in front of the anniversary eclipse. So this takes a lot of planning. So they did this and they were all involved but there was one thing that one of them didn't know and that was a question that she would be asked during the anniversary eclipse and here it was. And so the answer was yes. And the image was sent us and we investigated it and we just thought this was a great story and I'm kind of wondering what they're gonna do during the totally eclipse in April, but this was a cool image and it was really popular. We were very glad to receive it. So back to Juno, Juno orbiting Jupiter has taken a close sweep past Io, one of the more unusual moons in the solar system. So here we can see Io's surface doesn't have a lot of impact craters. It has a lot of volcanic craters because Io is turning itself inside out with its volcanism. And in fact, during this past in October, if you look really close near the top, you can see a volcano erupting. So this is the first of three close passes that Juno will be making past Io. The other two, one is at the very end of this year in December 30th and the other one is in February. And we even closer then and we'll get even better images of this very, very unusual moon, which is just about the size of our moon, Earth's moon. So the Lucy spacecraft of NASA is headed out toward the asteroid belt and it's when reaching the inner part of the asteroid and it got its image of the first of its asteroids, it will visit several asteroids. So this is Dinkinesh and I might be mispronouncing it because in my position, I see a lot of names but I don't hear a lot of names. So Dinkinesh is an asteroid kilometers across, not massive enough to make it into a sphere. But one thing we didn't know is that it was actually a double asteroid. And as we kept watching it, we didn't know it was a triple asteroid because this is one actually two. So we're trying to find out what kind of asteroids are in the solar system out near Jupiter. In the Lagrangian points near Jupiter, that will tell us about the early solar system back then and what condensed in and around Jupiter. So Lucy is just getting started. So we have two major rovers that are rolling around Mars. So this one is Perseverance along with, and there's also the Curiosity rover, they're on slightly different parts of Mars. So one thing that they can see, Ingenuity is sort of a friend of Perseverance that can fly and is still doing that. But you're all gonna play a movie and you'll be able to see this dust devil. We have dust devils here on Earth but this is a Martian dust devil. This is a 20 minute time lapse and you will be able to see it move across the surface of Mars. So we can actually see things move on Mars. But you might admire all the rocks on Mars and the color of Mars and the hills on Mars as discovered by Perseverance, which is looking for signs of water and possible signs that there used to be life on ancient Mars. So I'm gonna play the video now and hopefully you can see the dust devil moving. That was so much fun, we're gonna do it again. So here's what you don't know. This is another place where artificial intelligence actually had a play. So someone, a lot of imagery is now created even from NASA images. It's created by citizen scientists who download NASA images and do something with it. They make a better image. They have in this case, they made several images of the dust devil that were taken and they made that into a movie by feeding it to a artificial intelligence processing engine. So we don't, this thing was possible before the modern invention of artificial intelligence but AI makes it easier. This is just one really cool thing that can happen with artificial intelligence and we're gonna play it a third time because we're kind of short. So if you were on service of Mars, you could see a dust devil move across. Okay, I didn't wanna play it again. So during this past year, there was a new space telescope in orbit and it was the Euclid Space Telescope which was championed and launched essentially by the European Space Agency. It does have a NASA instrument on it but this is a telescope that's going to take wide-angle images of the sky deeper than before. This is the perseus cluster of galaxies so almost every spot you see here is itself a galaxy and these galaxies are interacting gravitationally but you can see pretty deep with this. So as Euclid tiles the sky, we're gonna be looking for humanity and astronomers will be looking for distortions of background galaxies so they're slightly distorted and that will tell us about dark energy and dark matter in the universe out to higher reaches than we've ever able to look for weak lensing before. And so this is all through the Euclid Space Telescope which has other science objectives. So it's a real space telescope in orbit and so we really have three big space telescopes up there. Okay, as reported in 2023 but actually occurred in 2021, the Earth was struck by an unusually energetic particle. Now many energetic particles when they hit the top of the Earth's atmosphere they create a spray of other particles because the Earth's atmosphere will break that particle up and as that particle hits other particles, it's other particles, other particles, creates lots of particles that hits the Earth. These are electrons, these are protons, these are muons, which are long story. So the particle that hit up here might have been a proton, might have been a heavy element of carbon, maybe even more heavy. And so this was just created a tremendous shower here that was unusual and it created several unknowns that are being investigated. First of all, one unknown was where did this thing come from? And so you look, you can trace this back and you can roughly say what comes from this part of the sky, well, what's there? And the answer is nothing obvious. So somehow this energetic particle was created by nothing obvious. The other thing is that how do you get a particle that has this kind of energy, TV energy, high in the TV range? So this hit above Utah. So this is an array in Utah. However, it was reported by a collaborator in Japan, which is why it says that. So there are still these arrays, there are many arrays that determined that measure cosmic rays and cosmic, the high energy gamma rays, they're in Argentina, they're in Utah, they're in Mexico, they're in Japan, they're in China. And so it's an exciting time for measuring high energy showers, as they're called, cosmic rays showers. Okay. So there's cool images still coming in from the Hubble Space Telescope. So this is from the Eagle Nebula. The Eagle Nebula have the pillars of creation, but if you zoom in on different parts of the Eagle Nebula, you see some other really cool stuff. So these look like torches, but they look like torches because they're illuminated by stars that are forming near the ends. So this is like a cavalcade of torches. And so these stars have an energetic wind that are going off and emitting high energy radiation that are evaporating their cocoons that have created them. And in this case, it looks like a torch. And there's little torches down here. So stars are forming here, as stars are forming in many nebula that we're able to see. And Hubble is particularly good at seeing this. Wind is good at seeing through some of this dust, so we can see through closer to the stars that are forming. So here you see the shot behind us. This was taken over Nianhu Lake in China, and I'm blocking out two people who are expert astrophotographers and took many images. Here you can see the Orion Nebula, the constellation of Orion. You can actually see the Orion Nebula too. And you can see Castor and Pollux and Gemini where these are coming from. And they did a really good job of getting many different geminids. Gemini meteors, which are tiny little bits of sand that sometimes have some ice or little bits of metal in them. And so you can see them as they streak across the sky and evaporate. Very few of these hit the ground. They're usually too small. What does happen is you get some twittering stuff that falls very slowly, but you don't have to wear your helmet and duck. This was a really good geminids because the moon did not interfere very much.  So we were fortunate, and we knew ahead of time that this would be a geminids that was pretty dark. And again, this is one of the things that you could see around the Earth. So it's really cool that we get images and people see this from every major place where people can see the sky. It's the night sky, as the International Astronomy Union likes to say recently and that unites humanity, and it continually does and will continue to do so. So I'm gonna leave you with a video. And this video is a real-time sunset. So this is what the sun sets looking like from looking across the ocean in Hawaii. But what you will see during this real-time sunset in the next 60 seconds is the atmosphere of the Earth causing distortions on the sun, which is completely round to the best, I mean, besides a little bit of filaments and stuff like that. But you will see the Earth's atmosphere create distortions, but you will also see a green orb created by the atmosphere. And you can see little green flashes that occur as it goes. So I will hit this video and let me turn it back. See it go down. So this is really what it looks like if you could zoom in on this. And the edge of the sun is falsely shown to be unusually jagged and it looks like it's sinking into the sea. But it's setting. Falsely insides. So there you see a green flash but you'll see more because this was a highly layered atmosphere. You don't always see this kind of structure as the sun sets. Many times the sun is more seductive. So you don't usually see one side being slightly that much different from the other. And here we see the sunset more and more. It's smaller and smaller. And it's from the distance of the girls. And now you're going to see the last green. And there it is, green flash. Gone in a second. But actually at the end it was also a blue flash because it became even blue for even a smaller fraction of the time as it disappeared. And then the sky was not completely dark because we see some sunlight that reflects off the Earth's atmosphere. But that was it. That was the sunset. You saw half the sun disappear. So with that, I will open it up. We will have some time for questions and I'm happy to take your questions. So I will take away the, I will stop sharing my screen. And again, I want to thank the Astronomical Society Pacific of the Night Sky Network for inviting me on. I'm very happy to be here. It's really one of the highlights of my year to address this learning and interested crowd. Thank you. Thank you so much. It is always a pleasure to have you.  They're always so interesting and they're always so much fun to, especially, I've personally never seen a green flash and so seeing that in real time, through the video is really, really cool. So we do have a handful of questions. And this one that comes from Gregory, this one you may not have an answer to. It may just come down to astrophotography personal preference. But why do most imagers of the sun in hydrogen alpha color the sun yellow? Hydrogen alpha is a 656.3 nanometers which is deep red and the image should be in its natural color. I don't know if you've noticed that some folks prefer yellow or red or if they've specified why in their image submissions and maybe you can give us a little insight on that. Well, I can tell you my thoughts on that. So yeah, we get a lot of images and hydrogen alpha is great because it gives you a lot of detail. So a lot of people, a lot of astrophotographers take many times broad spectrum but they take hydrogen alpha to get the tail of nebula. It also gives you some detail on the sun. But many times what's popular is what people expect. So many times astrophotographers are gonna color things the way people expect it to be. People expect the sun to be yellow which it's really not even to your eye. When you look up, the sun's pretty much white and most of the sunlight that comes through the Earth's atmosphere is actually tinged toward the greens. But the local lore is that the sun is yellow and when the sun is near the horizon many times it does appear somewhat yellow. So it's really just observer bias and giving people what they expect. So another question comes from Irene and this is actually a question that I've also had. May we use images shown here on Facebook or Facebook or other social media? Is there, I know that with copyright you have to make sure that you copyright the author of the photo but how would it work with APOD? Okay, so good question. So if you use the APOD images in a classroom setting particularly in a private classroom you're absolutely fine. So please use APOD in your classroom. If you use APOD images and you acknowledge that they're from APOD then you can use them pretty much anywhere. But what you can't do is extract the image and use it as if it was in the public domain and use it in any way that you wanted. Because when people submit their images to APOD they're not putting them in the public domain. Thank you so much. All right, and so this is going back to the Dust Devil video that you showed us. Why is the background in the photo of the Dust Devil on Mars white in color? Is it simply the atmosphere of Mars during the day? Okay, so the atmosphere of Mars is usually kind of orangish because there's a lot of dust usually. It can change, not being on Mars myself I've seen a lot of images. So I'm going off of what I've read in the images I've seen. Many times if you were on Mars you would see it to be the dust color of the rusting surface. However, there are times when the atmosphere would also be somewhat blue, just like with Earth's atmosphere because it would be scattering. So it's sort of a battle between the two. So this image was taken toward the horizon. So I have a feeling that the color was pretty well as it was, but you can on almost all the APODs we give links so you can find out more detailed information as to exactly what it was. And we almost always give a link to the astrophotographer or someone who's prepared the image or the NASA team that created it. So you can go and ask them directly and they will know more detail than we will know. But my best bet is it really was somewhat orange. Thank you. And now going back to our green flash sun setting. In the video of the sun setting, the images or the edges of the sun descended into the ocean were rounded, why? That was a question that came through the chat. Wow, they were rounded. Okay, never really thought about that. You write the sun pretty much as a pretty sharp edge as we see it, it's a pretty sharp disc. So I'm gonna guess and say that our earth atmosphere not only creates things blurry on the scale of arc seconds but when you're near the horizon and with all the scattering due to the earth, I think it actually makes probably into the arc minute. And so I think what you're seeing is blur beyond the arc second range due to the earth atmosphere but I'm guessing. Okay, so now this is a two-part question. This question is coming in from YouTube. How many submissions do you get per day? Okay, so good question. We get a lot. So we get about 20 good images submitted for everyone that we're able to use. So that's good for us. And it's good for the general public who gets to see a selection out of a whole bunch because once you see one selected from 20, it's gonna be pretty good. But unfortunately it means that there are 19, not exactly 20, there are around 19 that are good images that don't make it. So one thing we do is we post images to a Facebook group called Facebook APOD.SKY called Sky on Facebook. So when we have a good image or an educational image or an image that we like and we're thinking about and we wanna see how popular it is, we will post it to APOD.SKY and we post two or three images a day there. And so a good image is submitted is more likely to be on our focus group APOD.SKY than it is to make it on APOD central through APOD.nasa.gov. So you will see more images there, but I feel like I have to apologize to the many great imagers who send us great images that we're just unable to use. Keep going, keep doing great work. And many times astrophotography is an end in itself. You should be proud for creating a great image. And that's good for you, your friends and your local astronomy group. So now coming back to the conversation about AI, when do you maybe think AI will be integrated with conventional astronomy in terms of imaging? Like, when do you feel that it's going to be fully integrated where this is just kind of the norm? Good question. So it's already being integrated. It depends on how sophisticated your processing is. So my understanding is now people can take out plane trails and satellite trails by feeding images into artificial intelligence engines. It also gets into the definition as to what is just programming and what is artificially intelligent programming. So there's some kind of fuzzy line there that it's not really clear where you're crossing. So it's not generative AI, but for years now, people have been taking the ability to process images more easily with sophisticated software is growing more and more powerful and enabling more and more people to create sophisticated astronomical imagery. And some of that falls into the category of artificial intelligence. So for instance, we had an image last year and the year before of the Andromeda Galaxy. And people think, well, that's what the Andromeda Galaxy looks like, but you know what, not really. Because to get a long exposure image of the Andromeda Galaxy as many people in the Night Sky Network know, you have to take images that have satellite trails on them. Maybe Starlink trails now and planes that go across and stuck pixels. So what looks like a clean image of the Andromeda Galaxy has actually been processed. And it's many times been processed with AI. So what's real and what's AI becoming? So AI sometimes helps you create what it would look like if you were above the Earth's atmosphere, if you didn't have satellites and if you didn't have stuck pixels, if your eye could see that deep. And if you could see slightly into the infrared, that's what the images show. Thank you so much. So now there was a question about the image with the Benu, with the Cyrus Rex, with the lander. Were there any impact craters or it was just a clean parachute landing with just minimal dust? Oh, in the Utah desert? I think, okay, I don't think there was an impact crater. I think the reason for that is something it's called parachutes. So previously when the Genesis mission came back to Earth, the parachutes didn't deploy. And so it hit the Earth hard and made a small crater. But this time with parachutes, it didn't make, I'm pretty sure anything that would look pretty much like crater. So it's good thing that NASA got there first because in theory, someone could have been driving through the Utah desert with their pickup truck and said, hey, look at this. They could have loaded on the truck and he drove away. But NASA knew it was gonna come down pretty much. And so NASA was there first. Awesome. And I believe we have time for maybe just one more question. Now, thinking back to 1995, when you first started this, did you ever think it was gonna grow into this phenomenon that it has now where people vie pretty hard to get their images posted to APOD and that it's bragging rights. It's really, it's the badge of honor when you get an image on APOD. Did you ever think it was gonna grow to that? I don't think we really envisioned exactly what would happen. We had some idea that it would be useful in the classroom that was one of our goals. We were hoping that it'd be useful around the classroom. Also, one of the things way back in 1995 is that people were attaching images to emails back then, because there was the web, but it was just growing up. And so you would get an email and it would have an image attached and they would say something about the image. If you were lucky, it would be a press release. That would give you a good long text about the image, but nobody wants to read the whole press release. But to our horror in a way, some of the descriptions are, I don't know what this is, but it certainly looks cool to wrong descriptions.  Don't know what it is, but it's sure cool. So we wanted people to have a place to go that would describe in relatively short texts what it is and if they wanted to know more, they could link into it. And we envisioned that it would be useful in classrooms. So, but we had 14 page views the first day, which was more than we, we don't even know how they found out about us back then. 14 page views, wow. So, and we've been growing ever since. And so we're happy to be up. We don't, some people considered APOD to be a competition and we don't think of it that way. We think of it as just, if it was a bunch of amateur astronomers and astrophotographers and astronomers sitting around and they had all these images to choose from, what image would they say is the image of that day that they want to talk about the most? We try to recognize that. It could be a highly educational image. It could be a highly topical image. It could be a really cool deep image, but it would be the one that would get the most buzz just from people talking about. So we don't necessarily create the astronomical at the APOD of the day, the astronomy of the day is we recognize what it might be or what we think it would do. So that's how, so that's our modus operandi since 1995. And so in the future, we might be changing our look because NASA wants us to modernize and we also might be bringing on assistant editors and we're also getting older. So hopefully NASA is asking us who we're gonna hand it off to. So we're looking at the future plans of APOD, but for the next year, hopefully we'll again remain as it is, but we are looking toward the more distant future so that there will be into the more distant future and astronomy picture of the day. I love that.  How many do you get now on average per day? Well, okay, so our log files say we, I don't check every day, but the last day I did check was about a month ago when we had 1.8 million page views. Now, people think that's 8, 1.8 different people. It's not that many people. And there are bots that hit us and there are people who look at many different views on the same day. So it's not 1.8 million different people today, but what's easy for the log file to show is how many times there's a line in there. And so we have that many page views typically now per day. On our main NASA site, but we're all translated into, we have social media, we have other sites that are in different languages, not only on social media, but directly on the web. So it's going to be slightly larger there, but I think the English sites are still the largest. Thank you so much. All right, so with that, I definitely want to thank you so much, Dr. Nemeroff, for spending your time with us at Night Sky Network. And once again, for our Zoom attendees, there is a survey that you can go ahead and fill out. And after you filled out the survey, you will be entered to win a copy of Dr. Nemeroff's book. And that is Faster Than Light. I will go ahead and post that survey link into the chat here. Join us next month on Thursday, January 25th, where we will hear from Miguel Fernandez on Finding Aliens on Earth. And that is all for this evening. We are wishing you a happy and healthy new year. Keep looking up and we will see you next month.


Now we look at the centripetal force equation. And we start by reminding ourselves about centripetal acceleration, which was covered in an earlier video. This is the acceleration necessary to stay in circular motion. It must point towards the center of the circle. That means it's center-seeking. That's what centripetal stands for. And the equation that we ended up deriving for this in the previous video was AC, the centripetal acceleration, was equal to V squared over R, where it depended on how fast it was moving, the V, and how tight of a turn it was, the radius. So that leads us to centripetal force, the force needed to stay in circular motion. Think of it this way, if that force went away, the object would not continue moving in a circle, it would move off in a straight line. And like any force, it's going to be a mass times an acceleration. In this case, since it's a centripetal force, it's a mass times a centripetal acceleration. But we know what that centripetal acceleration should be. We saw that in our review slide just a moment ago, that it's V squared over R. So that means my centripetal force is M V squared over R. And the equation then tells us that the force is equal to the mass. I've got my radius on the bottom and my velocity squared on top. Now I can take a look at a unit for these quantities. Mass has a standard unit of kilograms, radius has a standard unit of meters, and velocity has a standard unit of meters per second. Putting this all together and remembering that my velocity is squared, I've got kilograms meter per second squared over a meter. Now there's quite a bit of algebra I can do in here, particularly with this meters per second squared. If I do all that algebra, I'll see that I've got kilogram meter per second squared. And that's also known as a Newton, which is the unit for any other type of force. So centripetal force is measured in units of Newtons just like any other force. So that's our introduction to centripetal force.


Hey everybody, welcome back to Magic Orthodoxy. My name is David and this is a magic book review Hey today, we're gonna look at Memorandum from Woody Aragon. Alright, so why are we taking the time to look at magic books? Well, magic books are cool You know a lot of people buy plastic gimmicky tricks that are like one hit wonders or they buy DVDs and that has like 10 tricks and then what they Don't realize is some of times the price of those DVDs you could buy a book you could buy a book That's thick, huge, has tons of magic tricks, has theory, is presented by well-known authors and Books are awesome because you don't have to fast forward. You don't have to rewind. They're with you everywhere You want to go? You want to take a magic book camping? You can take a camping. It doesn't need to plug in You can read it in your bed. You can read it in the car You can read it on a train. Magic books are a great great asset and you should be building a magic library Alright, so who is Woody Aragon? Woody Aragon is one of the most important modern card magic creators His first book a book in English was a bestseller that influenced top magicians names like pen and teller Eric Jones pit heartling Choose Woody's tricks for their shows why because Woody's magic is strong It's clever and it fools people and best of all Audiences love it in this brand new book memorandum Woody reveals his revolutionary work on the memorized deck his memorized deck a brand new Memorized deck you want to see the trailer? This is it. Hello my friends. My name is Woody Aragon And I am very very very sad. I am not it's a joke. I am very happy because I have a new book Memorandum and I am very very very sad because I am going to share for first time all this stuff It's a four here. I have a four. I have a four and I have a four four. So it's very good It's very good I can't believe it. I can't believe it. You will be So I am very proud of this stuff and I think it's the time to share So memorandum what's it about like I said, it's a brand new deck stack the deck stack that he came up with the memorandum Stack it's a memorized deck stack that takes on all the properties of Wontemarie's Mamonica and Simon Ironson's stack plus it has a couple of other concepts that Woody's created to throw it into there And it's an easy stack to memorize Woody promises that after reading the first 200 pages or so You should have this deck stack memorized in 30 minutes. Alright, so what's inside? What's inside the table of contents? Well right away your forward is from Max Maven So right there, you know, it's got to be good and then in the next 200 pages or so He describes the stack and then a lot of his features and right away You're initially going to get a lot of poker tricks You're going to get something called 10 card poker deal the Texas hold exhibition Why aces the almost dead man's hand matching the cards double psychorama how the real card sharks? Octo poker octo poker to stud poker the ultimate NBC the name to blushing card Clash the gambler divines and so much more Like I said, Woody says that if you read through these first couple chapters You're going to have this deck stack memorized in no time then in the next hundred pages or so You're going to learn a new stack at the Siamese stack this Part of the book is worth the price of the book right here. This part is awesome It covers a brand new and memorized deck that some people already know but it has killer applications and The best part is it's adaptable. So let's just say you've already memorized a Ronson stack or you've already memorized my Monica Or any other deck stack these are going to be applicable chapter 4 goes into the Siamese deck You're going to learn an any card to any number.  All right, so what's it cost? What's it going to cost? It's $60. It is $60. It is up there It is one of the more pricier books, but it is a hardback book Okay, it is a hardback and it is almost 400 pages with illustrations. All right, so what do I think? What do I think I think if you already don't do a memorized deck like if you haven't memorized my Monica yet If you haven't memorized the deck stack, this is probably the one you want because this is going to be simple This is going to be easy. Like I said, it's it's certainly user-friendly It's a really good option and the Siamese Section like I said is worth the price of the book. This is a brilliant book All right So that is my review of memorandum from Woody Aragon as always I want to thank Murphy's magic supplies for allowing me to have this book so that I can do the review for you And if you would like to purchase this book for yourself, you can find it from one of your very favorite Murphy's magic dealers Thanks. Bye


Radiogenomics is a new field of medical science that combines the study of radiology and genomics. It can provide valuable insights into disease progression and treatment outcomes by analyzing the relationship between genetic mutations and imaging data. Recent advances in technology have enabled the integration of radiologic and genomic data, which has led to the development of radiogenomics. The field has been particularly successful in the areas of brain tumors and breast cancer, with recent studies focusing on gastrointestinal cancer as well. Artificial intelligence, AI, is also being used to analyze large amounts of data, making radiogenomics more efficient and accurate. The future of radiogenomics lies in its ability to provide more precise diagnoses and treatments, leading to better patient outcomes. This article was authored by Asamo Hashino and Hajime Yokota.


My name is David Snyder, that's Chris Casano, and as you can see, we're going to talk about decentralized programmable key pairs. We are the two co-founders of a project called Lit Protocol, and to start with a big, exciting hook. We are living in a world where with threshold cryptography, from a certain point of view, you can consider that private keys no longer exist. So what do we specifically mean by this? This Lit network is essentially a distributed custody programmable key, and one of the key technologies at the heart of this is something called a DKG, a distributed key generation. And so what Lit is specifically is a distributed network of nodes that are custodian shares of an underlying private key. I'll take a quick moment to talk about how security works on this network, and then we'll get into some of the use cases. But essentially, this key is formed in this distributed key generation context and stored as shares across these nodes, and then all of the nodes operations take place inside of a trusted execution environment, and then there are named node operators who are staking that are running the programs on this underlying key. And so now let's talk about what some of those programs can be. So as you know, a key can functionally do two things. It can read or encrypt and write, and this network provides the same functionality in a programmatic way. So let's talk about how the read works first. The hexagons in the middle represent the Lit nodes. In this case, Alice, let's say, is a creator and wants to say anybody who owns Alice's NFT can see her video. She would encrypt that video client side and store it somewhere in public, whether it's on a blockchain or a storage network like IPFS, and then create a set of rules that says only somebody who owns Alice's NFT can see that video. Bob owns that NFT. He shows up later. He signs a message, and he broadcasts that to the nodes. Each of the individual nodes validates against the blockchain. Does Bob own that NFT? And the whole kind of frame of view here is thinking about these public storage, excuse me, public state machines, as access control lists. At which point the nodes verify that Bob has that node, or excuse me, has that NFT, and each of the individual nodes produces something called a decryption share. You could think about this like an authorization. Those authorizations are then sent to Bob, who's collecting them client side, and a good mental model is kind of similar to the way that you may think about torrenting.  In this case, you're collecting bits of authorization. And once you've collected a threshold of those authorizations, in this case, decryption shares, Bob can reproduce that symmetric key associated with the video or that content and decrypt that client side. And so some of the applications that we're seeing this use for today are things like token-gated social media, like token-gated chat. This technology is used hand-in-hand a lot with the lens protocol, for example, where only let somebody who's following me on lens see my posts. We also see this happening in the context of intellectual property, whether it's token-gated videos or various other content. And then really excitingly, there's also been a lot of stuff around verifiable credentials and selective disclosure. So I'm sure you all are familiar with the notion of signing in with Google as an authorization method for how one logs into a site. What we're starting to see is some teams build this out in a much more kind of user sovereign type of way, whereby when a user goes logs into a site, they're conveying decryption rights, or quote, the read rights, to that application to see their private information. And it starts to become like a pretty interesting picture and we'll talk more about what this user-owned web looks like. But in a way, this is kind of one definition of Web 3, where the user, rather than necessarily showing up to a website with their own kind of self-sovereign server, they're arriving with their own encrypted shard of the open web and then selectively disclosing to various friends or applications what information from that shard they can decrypt or read. And so this product has been out since January. We still are running all the nodes centrally and we'll have those decentralized by the end of the year. And there's hundreds of applications that are leveraging this. But just last week, we started talking publicly about new capacity, which is the ability to essentially do distributed custody programmatic signing. And as you can see, the architecture is incredibly similar, but instead of the nodes reading the blockchain as an access control list, they are reading programs that are stored at a specific CID on IPFS. Each of those nodes is running those programs. And now in this case, instead of producing the decryption share, which lets that party decrypt some content, they're producing a signature share. Again, coming back to the idea that keys can functionally do two things, kind of encryption and signing. And then those shares can be aggregated and you can make a right to your favorite decentralized state machine, like Ethereum. And so talking about some of the applications for this, there's a huge list, right? Thinking about the key as an application development platform, we kind of like think about it as a paintbrush. We're really just starting to explore some of the application potential here, but I'll run through a couple right now. So one would be like DeFi automation. The state-of-the-art for self-custody DeFi today is if you have some staked tokens and the state-of-the-art is to sign up for some DeFi alerting service, such that when the price starts to drop, you get a text, you have to wake up in the middle of the night and push a button on your ledger. But in a world where you've staked those tokens from one of these cloud wallets, as we can kind of call them, you could have that program listening to a feed and when the price drops, have a program that kicks off, that unstakes the tokens, sells them for USDC on a dex and sends them to your ledger. And this is all happening kind of without a human signer in the loop because the key is custodyed in this distributed context at the network level. Chris will talk a little bit more about vaults, but in a way what we're talking about here is making private keys liquid. So you could send a bunch of NFTs and tokens to a given address and then trade the underlying ownership of that address. There's also a lot to explore here as it relates to account abstraction, doing things like hooking up biometric auth like Apple pass key as the auth method into one of these cloud keys in this whole context of how do we bring the next billion users into this ecosystem and abstract away the complexity associated with the seed phrase. This is really exciting and certainly a lot to explore in the context of cross-chain messaging and bridging as well. And so with that, I'll pass this clicker off to Chris. Thank you, David. Yeah, so I'd like to introduce the idea of a decentralized programmable key pair, which we call PKPs. A PKP is an ECDSA key pair that's held as private key shares, custodied by the lit nodes. You can create a PKP by minting an NFT that represents ownership over that PKP. And so whoever owns that NFT can ask the PKP to sign anything on their behalf, including Ethereum or even Bitcoin transactions. You can do this by writing some JavaScript code that we call a lit action. So this is a really basic hello world lit action. It literally signs the string hello world with ECDSA. And what happens is this code will be run on all the lit nodes in parallel.  And I just explained that whoever owns the PKP NFT can request a signature using the PKP. But what's actually more interesting is that you can also grant the ability to sign using your PKP to a lit action. This is very similar to the token approval pattern that we use on Ethereum, where you can grant a smart contract the ability to transfer your tokens. But instead of granting the ability to transfer tokens, you're granting the ability to sign anything with this programmable key pair. So here's how it actually works. The user can create a lit action execution request, which you can see at the top there. Oops, wrong button. I think I had a laser, cool. And they pass in an IPFS CID, which is some JavaScript code, and a cryptographic signature that could come from their Ethereum wallet, an Apple passkey, or any public key cryptography scheme. They send that execution request to all of the lit nodes in parallel. The lit nodes use a JavaScript runtime to execute the lit action from IPFS. They check the PKP authentication by talking to a blockchain where the PKP NFT lives. And the lit action can also make arbitrary HTTP requests. So it can also act as a kind of oracle. So you can pull any data in and use it in your JavaScript lit action. The lit action can request a signature using the threshold private key share that creates a signature share that gets sent down to the user that initiated the request. They could be using a browser or this could be like a server-side client. They combine those signature shares and they broadcast that signed transaction to Ethereum or any ECDSA blockchain. And I'm talking about a transaction here, but it doesn't actually have to be a transaction. It could be any signed data, like a write on a ceramic or anything else like that. An interesting pattern that LitSupports is called Mint Grant Burn. The idea is that you mint a PKP, grant it the ability to use a lit action, then burn the PKP in a single atomic transaction. This means that the PKP can only ever be used by that lit action because burning the PKP makes it impossible to use the PKP for signing anything else. A kind of fun toy example would be creating a lit action that takes any number as input, but will only sign that number if it's prime. Since anyone can check that the signature matches the public key of the PKP, they know that any number signed by the corresponding private key must be prime and the signature acts like a proof that the number is prime. You end up with a kind of prime number certification system. This can be used to create a proof of a lit action to create a proof of any JavaScript code execution. This is kind of similar to how ZK proofs work conceptually, but instead of being proven by pure math, it's proven by the guarantees provided by threshold cryptography via the lit network. Here's kind of how that works. The way that you interact with and grant access to use things is by talking to a PKP smart contract that currently lives on Sello, but we're going to move that to Polygon soon, and you mint the PKP, grant access for it to use the lit action in this authorized lit action table, and then you burn it all in one transaction. We talked a little bit about using a PKP as a vault.  Then you can sell the PKP NFT on OpenSea and transfer all the assets at once. You are essentially trustlessly trading a private key, something that has been impossible until now. This breaks soulbound tokens, because now you can trustlessly sell the wallet that contains your soulbound tokens in the same way that you could sell a traditional non-soulbound ERC721 NFT. This also enables things like liquid staking for chains that lock up the staked tokens, like Ethereum 2. You could use a PKP as an EOA cloud wallet. Because a PKP can grant the ability to sign to a lit action, you can create any auth method that you want, as long as it's possible to express it in JavaScript. You could create a wallet that will only sign if the user calling the lit action is a member of a DAO. You could use another signature algorithm for verification that's unsupported by Ethereum, like ED25519 or BLS. You could even create a wallet that will only sign transactions on Tuesdays. You can use a PKP for automation, because the lit nodes do the actual signing. You could create a lit action that checks the price of a token you're staking, drops below a certain price, unsteak the token, and sell it. This works across chains and could run while you're asleep. You could make any sort of complicated automated trading bot without needing to have a hot wallet sitting on a server somewhere that will get hacked when you forget to update your Linux distribution. And here's some ideas of a lot of different things that you can build. I won't read them all, but you can check them out. We could talk about some of these ideas, I think, which is worth pointing to, but maybe just a few more metaphors. One of the ways that I really like thinking about this programmable key pair notion, what we've been calling a PKP, in a way, the centralized equivalent is thinking about this like an Amazon Lambda function plus the Amazon KMS. But in this case, the KMS isn't something that's centralized. It's distributed across this threshold cryptography-based network, and these lit actions are the equivalent of the Lambda functions. And so it's this distributed system for doing the same type of operations that you would build with a Lambda function and Amazon's KMS. But in this case, you, as the application developer, when you come and bring customers on board, you have this kind of distributed backend where you can't get access to the keys, where if you build a DeFi automation bot and start selling that somebody has a subscription today, you could jump into Amazon's KMS and grab the keys and the funds out at any point. A couple other interesting things that I think are really fun to think about when we start to think about the notion of kind of this cloud key. There's a lot of implications for this as a DAO's key. So we could talk about DAOs and DeFi and use our own social media. But in the context of a DAO, the current state of the art for DAOs is, of course, to use smart contract wallets to manage the treasury. But more and more, especially protocol DAOs, we're seeing things that want to extend cross-chain and cross ecosystem. And so to start to think about the account abstraction, not at the level of the blockchain, but at the level of the signing algorithm and creating the rules and the governance at the level of the signing algorithm starts to get really interesting because you can have the same rules around governance, issuing verifiable credentials for your DAO, making transactions on ETH, doing rights to ceramic all from the same underlying curve. And then, yeah, I think another one that's kind of really interesting here is thinking about this in the context of mainstream adoption. We touched on this a little, but there's always capacities to add different levels of authorization and security to wallets. But we've been really, really excited about groups that have started to integrate this with the likes of Discord and Apple Passkey. And there's definitely a lot of opportunity to build really sophisticated tooling in this ecosystem. It's one of the reasons that we're really excited to give this talk. We have a core team that's super focused on this threshold cryptography component, but there's all kinds of opportunities to stick an email server inside of an enclave and use that as a methodology for authorizing this with email. That's something that we're not going to build internally. And so if this kind of tooling and privacy tooling and mainstream adoption tooling is something that you're interested in, definitely come talk to us. But yeah, maybe we'll keep this slide up and we'll take questions for the next 10 minutes if there are any. Thanks so much. How do we establish the trust relationship between the clients and the nodes? Because anyone kind of like snooping on that can essentially rebuild the signing or the Christian key. Yeah, I mean right now you pass a cryptographic signature with your request to the lit nodes. So that could be a signed wallet message. Like if you want to prove something about your wallet, it could be any other cryptographic signature. So it could be, you know, you need some encryption, right? Because like you need to keep this. You don't need encryption. Just a signature. And the nodes verify the signature and by verifying the signature they can prove that you own that wallet. Yes, but they're going to send you in exchange like a key share, right? Yeah, they don't actually send a key share. They send a decryption share or a signature share. So the key shares themselves never leave the node. Got it. Okay. I think that like I misunderstood this part. And so the second question that I have is essentially like can you do in any form of resizing of, you know, this, I wouldn't call it like a quorum, but like, you know, just this, this set. Oh, like changing the set of nodes and changing the threshold for example. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So we use a technology called proactive secret sharing. And what that lets us do is it lets the nodes, like new nodes join and leave the network and keep the underlying secret the same, but the private key shares are incompatible between like epochs when nodes leave and when nodes join. Basically this process of proactive secret sharing is quite similar to the distributed key generation process. And, you know, the secret is very, very simply put, right? A line on a graph. In this key refresh process, you're signing new points along the same underlying secret, such that the shares in epoch two are incompatible with epoch one, but they still represent the same underlying secret. And that's functionally the goal of this network is to persist a shared cryptographic secret in perpetuity. Okay, I think that ties into my third question, which is how do you ensure kind of like any form of like non-so-like counters so that, you know, essentially like the number of time that this thing has been signed or like decrypted. Maybe you want to like ensure it that like, you know, you can decrypt it x amount of times. You don't want to, you know, you may want to like sequence essentially, especially for vaults, like operations, right? Like the signing of like specific nonces or like just ensuring that like you don't have essentially just like resigning operations with different nonces either. I'm a true curious. How do you think about that? Yeah. So what you could do, so the lit nodes themselves are mostly stateless. So they don't necessarily have a place to store anything like that. But what you can do in the lit actions is you can read and write from blockchains or from IPFS or wherever. So you could like at the end of a lit action after you create the signature share, write to a chain to record that a transaction has already happened. And then if somebody tries to run that lit action again it could, you know, check and see like, you know, did this transaction already happen or not? And if so, it wouldn't sign. And that's like how it works within the lit system. Within like, you know, the if you're signing a Ethereum transaction, for example, right? You would just include the nonce in the thing to be signed. When you send up like whatever you want to the lit action to be signed. And so then you couldn't reuse that signature, right? Because it has already been broadcast with that nonce. Maybe I missed how you explained how to create a PKP without any keys, but how does that work? And how does the user not have a key and how do they authenticate what things they want the network to do? Yeah. I mean, they need some kind of key. It could be an Ethereum wallet or it could be like Apple Passkey, which is like one click and they generate a public-private key pair for you that's backed up to your iCloud in an encrypted way. It could also be like potentially a Web 2 auth method like Discord login anything like that. It just needs to be basically an authentication method that can be verified by the lit nodes. Every time someone creates a PKP, do you generate a new threshold key? And where is that key stored? Are you spinning up new cloud nodes to store those keys? So the lit nodes, each node stores multiple key shares. So there's a million keys on the network and a hundred nodes. Each of the nodes would store a million key shares, representing one share from each of the underlying cloud wallets or cloud keys. And what kinds of thresholds are you guys using in production, in test? Like the number threshold? Yeah. We're using two thirds right now and that's hard-coded across the network so it's not user-changeable. Yeah. We're using ECDSA, non-interactive signing on the signing side and then on the encryption and decryption side we're using BLS keys. We have some more questions in the middle area. Do you mind if I have one more question? That's a fourth one, right? What are your plans for decentralization and how do you plan to grow this network? It sounds like it's a pretty fixed set and you do no rotations. There's this notion of the proactive secret sharing which is not quite a rotation because it's the same underlying secret but some of our cutting edge work is right at the notion of changing the threshold which makes the network become more dynamic over time but currently there is the capacity for new nodes to join the network and for the key to be refreshed creating those new shares in epoch 2, 3, 4 and so on and then practically in terms of the plan by the end of the year this network will be up with a handful of named node operators and then those node operators are functionally a dow of sorts that decide who comes in and who comes out to the system. Thanks everybody.