Let's get started right now. Greetings, everybody. Welcome to the Rogers State Library, and our special guest, Amanda Sood. If you haven't been here before, you should know that this library was built and opened in 2008, I believe. And it is now 28,000 square feet, as opposed to the 6,200 that we grew out of. It was founded in 1877, and of course it's had a number of different iterations over that time. We're just delighted with what we have here, and we're happy that all of you could be here to share the evening. So with that, I'll turn it over to Adam Graver, who will introduce our speaker. He doesn't know the other way. He'll have to bear with me for a few minutes as a little bit of background and point to introduce Claire is. So the reason we are here this evening, I work at Roger Williams University, and we have the Talking Library series at Roger Williams University, which we run usually three talks per semester. We've partnered with Roger's three to do at least two talks here as well. This coincides with our Bermont Fellowship. The Bermont Fellowship was a fellowship that we as an alum endowed for students to apply through blind submissions and have a master class with a distinguished visiting writer. This student happened to have been a philosophy major who took some writing classes who believed there were others like him, and he wanted it to be open to the whole university, not just for writing students. So we had six students who were chosen to work with Claire. Kathy Quinn and the Quinn Foundation generously opened up the home, and they have their workshop at the home up there yesterday for about four hours, I think. And as part of that is a public talk, which again is co-sponsored through the University Library, Roger's Free, and the Jane Lodell Endowment, which is part of Roger's Free, to promote discussion of books and literature. What else can I say? Oh, where's Maggie? So we have a student back there. One of the things that we do through the library and through the Creative Writing Department, which is very important to us as our students, we have a group of students that work very hard on freedom of expression issues, and particularly with writers and or academics that are in prison internationally for what they've written about. And Maggie is here representing some of the students that are working on the case of an Iranian scholar who was a chemistry professor who was in prison for being asked to write about the nuclear deal in Iran, and once he wrote about the nuclear deal in Iran, was put in jail for what he wrote about the nuclear deal in Iran. So Maggie has information on it for afterward of petitions you can sign to help women with scholars at risk in particular. And the other thing I will just say is, you know, this, we, in the spring, this is fall, no, this is spring, in the fall, I don't think that way. I think in months and months. But next spring we'll have Don Tripp will be speaking at this joint series about her new book, Georgia, which is a novel of Georgia O'Keefe, and the Burma, the speaker I have for the Burma Fellowship next fall, so basically about this time next year. We're seeing sort of hard news. Next spring. You said next fall, but I think you mean next spring. Next spring. April. Yes. We'll be Rick Moody. So Rick Moody will be our Burma Fellow, our visiting fellow for next spring. So that's a little bit of the history and a little bit of the future. But last summer, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the International Journal of Literature, Politics and Culture, an exhibit at the Tang Art Museum at Skidmore College paired visual artworks with excerpts of various written pieces from the journal's pages from over its years. The name of the exhibit and its subsequent catalog was Afflict the Comfortable. The title took its name from an often used definition of one of the rules of art, meaning it serves either to comfort the afflicted or afflict the comfortable. Now while that typically references the dynamic between those in power versus those who are victimized by the power structure, it also can be and has been applied to a more personal, introspective level as well. When I think of Clermasud's work, particularly of her latest novel, The Woman Upstairs, my first thought lands on the notion of afflicting the comfortable.  In fact, she is bold enough to give us a character who breaks our conventions of polite gentility of comfort, a role that Nora herself has played with some level of success. Meanwhile, her true sense of self, one that often contradicts the accepted norm, remains hidden in private. Only by the time we reach the end of the novel do we realize that all along, Nora has been making an argument a polemic for eventually, through the storyline of the novel, becoming at peace with an attitude and worldview that is contrary to the conventional sense of etiquette that the culture has judged. Is Clermasud's novel afflicting the comfortable because she is suggesting something outside of the norm, needling at some of our deepest fears or secret less thans? And now, my own contradiction. If through her book, Claire is calling out some of our deepest fears and less thans, then is she in a way also providing comfort? Just as Nora ultimately wants to be seen for who she is, as opposed to feeling invisible or forgotten, doesn't the novel that brings out what we think our own secret flaws or quirks actually provide comfort by making us feel a little less alone? Last week, I sat in this very room with at least 25 women from ages 18 and up as they discussed the women upstairs. And while opinions and interpretations and analyses vary, one underlying trait was shared by most. Compassion. Like Nora or don't like her, root for her or feel frustrated by her. It is difficult not to feel compassion for her. And that, I suspect, is something to take comfort in. Please welcome Claire Missy. Give her a round of applause. Thank you. What a beautiful introduction. Thank you. What a gift to be so generously read. Thank you, Adam. And thank you all for being here. I'm leaving it this is though I needed to, but I don't because I have a thing here. So there's nothing there. But it's wonderful to be here. And I've just had the most marvelous visit. And the seminar yesterday with such tremendous young writers was really a gift. And it's great to be with you all this evening.  I thought I didn't need to see it because I could imagine what it was like. But that wasn't true. That wasn't true. Bristol is also very beautiful. A more livable scale, I believe. So I thought this evening to read a little from the woman upstairs. I hesitated because it's now been a little while. And I've been working on something else and I had the moment of thinking, should I read to you from the thing I'm working on? And then I thought, no, I'm not brave enough. So I'm not. So I'm reading you from Nora's story. And then if anybody has questions, I think we'll have time for that afterwards. So a little background. Nora Eldridge, the narrator of this novel is a school teacher, elementary school teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The... I feel she gets a little... She's had something of... Well, insofar as she has any public life, she's had something of a bad rap because people say she's angry. To which I have several responses. One of them, aren't we all? At some point or other, isn't everybody angry sometime? But I would say that there are events that you hear about at the end of the novel that have transpired fairly recently when she's ranting at the beginning of the novel. But for most of the novels, she's not angry. The rant came to me like a voice in my ear, and I wrote it down, and then I had to figure out who was ranting. So that's how I met Nora Eldridge, was she had to go. And I thought I would start by reading just the first couple of pages. With apologies for the swear words. How angry am I? You don't want to know. Nobody wants to know about that.   And I speak to my father every day on the telephone, every day, mind you, and what kind of weather do you have on your side of the river, because here it's pretty gray and a bit muggy too.  Don't all women feel the same? The only difference is how much we know we feel it, how in touch we are with our fury.   What do I mean? I mean the second graders at Appleton Elementary, sometimes the first graders even, and by the time they get to my classroom, to the third grade, they're well and truly gone. They're full of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry and French manicures and cute outfits, and they care how their hair looks in the third grade. They care more about their hair or their shoes than about galaxies or caterpillars or hieroglyphics.  Even worse on your tune stone than beautiful daughter is looked good. Everyone used to know that, but we're lost in a world of appearances now. That's why I'm so angry really, not because of all the chores and all the making nice and all the duty of being a woman or rather of being me because maybe these are the burdens of being human. Really, I'm angry because I've tried so hard to get out of the hall of mirrors, this sham and pretend of the world or of my world on the east coast of the United States of America in the first decade of the 21st century.  And the Fun House isn't fun anymore and it isn't even funny, but there doesn't seem to be a door marked exit. At the fair each summer when I was a kid, we visited the Fun House with its creepy grinning plaster face two stories high. You walked in through its mouth between its giant teeth along its hot pink tongue. Just from that face you should have known. It was supposed to be a lark, but it was terrifying. The floors buckled or they lurched from side to side and the walls were crooked and the rooms were painted to confuse perspective. Lights flashed, horns blared in the narrow vibrating hallways lined with fattening mirrors sometimes the ceiling fell or the floor rose or both happened at once and I thought I'd be squashed like a bug. The Fun House was scarier by far than the haunted house, not least because I was supposed to enjoy it. I just wanted to find the way out. But the doors marked exit led only to further crazy rooms to endless moving corridors. There was one route through the Fun House relentless to the very end. I've finally come to understand that life itself is the Fun House. All you want is that door marked exit the escape to a place where real life will be and you can never find it. No, let me correct that. In recent years there was a door there were doors and I took them and I believed in them and I believed for a stretch that I'd managed to get out into reality and God the bliss and terror of that the intensity of that it felt so different until I suddenly realized I'd been stuck in the Fun House all along. I'd been tricked. The door marked exit hadn't been an exit at all. I'm not crazy angry, yes crazy, no. My name is Nora Marie Eldridge and I'm 42 years old which is a lot more like middle age than 40 or even 41.  Quite nice looking in some moments I think is the consensus rather like the heroines of Harlequin romances read in quantity in my youth. I'm neither married nor divorced but single.  Until last summer I taught third grade at Appleton Elementary School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and maybe I'll go back and do it again. I just don't know. Maybe instead I'll set the world on fire. I just might.  If you're thinking how can such an angry person possibly teach young children, let me assure you that every one of us is capable of rage and that some of us are prone to it but that in order to be a good teacher you must have a modicum of self control which I do. I have more than a modicum. I was brought up that way. Second, I'm not an underground woman harboring resentment for my miseries against the whole world or rather it's not that I'm not in some sense an underground woman, aren't we all who have to cede and swerve and step acknowledged and unadmired and unthanked?  No Ralph Ellison basement full of light bulbs for us. No Dostoev skin metaphorical subterra. We're always upstairs. We're not the mad women in the attic. They get lots of play one way or another. We're the quiet woman at the end of the third floor hallway whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell with a cheerful greeting and who from behind close doors never makes a sound. In our lives of quiet desperation the woman upstairs is who we are with or without a goddamn tabby or a pesky lullabying Labrador and not a soul registers that we are furious. We're completely invisible. I thought it wasn't true or not true of me but I've learned I am no different at all. The question now is how to work it, how to use that ability to make it burn. So so that sort of is the beginning and the end sort of. I mean that's where it will end. I mean that's how she's feeling at the end. She the story is mostly about a year in her life when the family comes to Cambridge there's a little boy in her class and she meets his parents first she's in the classroom his name is Reza and she meets his parents Surina and Scander who have come from Paris but the mother is Italian and the father is Lebanese and they're there on a fellowship the husband has a fellowship and it turns out that Surina is an artist and this matters because what Nora just wanted to do when she grew up was be an artist and she makes art in her spare time in her spare room she says in the novel I wanted two things I wanted to make art and have children and I do have children but they go home at the end of the day and I do make art but it's you know I make it in the spare room at the weekend but Surina comes to town and offers to share a studio with her and there begins for Nora a sort of charmed and wonderful in which all sorts of things that seemed impossible suddenly seem possible and then it gets complicated we were talking today in class one of the things that I wanted to write about was specifically Nora's but a person's interior life so much of what matters that's something that always interests me it is true I think in any book the epigraph to the last book The Emperor's Children is from Antipole and it's not what happens it's what we think happens that matters and it seems to me that our our experiences are so ultimately private you know I was telling somebody the other day in college I had a I briefly had a boyfriend who I liked very much and there was an evening I didn't I didn't love him or anything but I liked him very much it was an evening where we had a long conversation until two in the morning and then I called him the next day and I said should we go to that movie after all and he said but we broke up last night and I said did we I didn't realize it just hadn't occurred to me that there was always talking about you're so European I was like what are you talking about but it didn't you say I'm breaking up with you anyway but there are many examples of that where you know where each of us has a different experience and so much of what matters most doesn't break the surface and I mentioned this I guess yesterday but but I'll mention another one too I don't know how many of you remember in Anna Karenina when Levin's brother comes to stay the judge comes to stay and then Kitty's friend is she called Farfara who's essentially a governess is visiting also and they have a sort of flirtation and everybody thinks that he's going to propose and they're going to get married and in fact they both think that and then they go off they go off to pick mushrooms in the forest and with great expectation everybody's sure this is the day this is the moment and then they have some banal exchange about the mushrooms like do you know what kind this one is and she answers I think it's the such and so and then the moment passes and they both know the moment has passed and they both know he will never ask and that they will never get married and then they go back and join everybody else and life goes on and it's this almost this sort of crescendo and diminuendo of music that never breaks the surface nobody ever said anything and nobody really knows why but there's also in the other example that I was citing yesterday is in Chekhov's Lady with the Little Dog which some of you may know where Gurov is a middle aged man who's married with a family and has had a number of affairs and he goes to Yalta the lady with the little dog who's never had an affair before but she's also married and then they part company and he goes back to Moscow but he can't stop thinking about her and eventually they resume the affair but there's a moment where he's taking his child to school and he thinks to himself how can it be that the thing that is most important to me in my whole life nobody else knows about and then he has a second thought which is this is true for everyone and and I think that is something that I'm always, well not always how would you get anything done but I'm intermittently and often aware of is how little we know and I wanted to tell a story of what it was like inside Nora's head all the things that don't break the surface all the things she doesn't say except to the reader of the book but now I will read a little bit of her history about her childhood and then we can chat if you'd like from the beginning then but briefly I was born into an ordinary family in a town an hour up the coast from Boston called Manchester by the sea the 60s were barely a ripple there at the end of the Boston commuter line it must have been our perfect beach called Singing Beach on account of its fine pale musical sand but perhaps also because it is so widely and so long lauded that afforded me my delusions of grandeur it makes sense that if you stand almost daily in the middle of a perfect crescent of shore with a vista open to eternity you'll conceive of possibility differently from someone raised in a wooded valley or among the canyons of a big city I feel like you guys have that advantage here or maybe more likely they came from my mother fierce and strange and doomed I had a mother and a father a big brother eight years bigger than me though so we hardly seemed to the same family by the time I was nine he was gone and a tortoise shell cat zipper and a mangy runty mutt from the shelter named Sputnik who looked like a wig of rags on sticks his legs were so scrawny we marveled they didn't snap my father worked in insurance in Boston he took the train each morning the 752 and he proceeded very respectively but apparently not very successfully because my parents never seemed to have money to spare my mother stayed at home and smoked cigarettes and hatched schemes for while she tested cook book recipes for a publisher she was paid for it and for months she fed us elaborate three and four course meals that involved eggy sauces and frequently as I recall Marcella wine briefly and humiliatingly for me she fancies herself a clothes designer and spent several months at the sewing machine in the spare room in a swoon of tobacco smoke her output was at once unusual and not unusual enough she made paisley paisley jersey mini-dresses for girls of my size not at first glance dissimilar to those off the rack but then you'd see she'd cut portholes around the midriff and edged them with rickrack so that a girl's white tummy would peer through or that she'd made the sleeve so they attached not with seams but with a flurry of ribbons a circle of multi-colored bows that would look bedraggled after a single washing cheerfully impractical she ran up at least two dozen outfits of various designs the summer I was nine and then took a booth from which to sit at the fair in a neighboring town my mother unlike my father instilled in me the sense that unpredictability was essential not to be like your neighbor that is everything she would say and because of this because of the bright flame of her it took me a long time to realize that she too was cautious and bourgeois frightened of the unknown and so uncertain of herself that she could hardly bear to make a mark how else could she have stayed resolutely wedded to the ordinary to my father to the carefully ordained changing routines of Manchester by the sea and it explains much about me too about the limits of my experience about the fact that the person I am in my head is so far from the person I am in the world nobody would know me from my own description of myself which is why when called upon merely I grant to provide an account I tailor it I adapt I try to provide an outline that can in some way correlate to the outline that people understand me to have that I suppose I actually have at this point but who I am in my head very few people really get to see that almost none it's the most precious gift I can give to bring her out of hiding maybe I've learned it's a mistake to reveal her at all so from our ordinary family in our ordinary house a center entrance colonial with its potted geraniums on the stone porch and its charmingly untended you hedges nibbling at the windows I made my way out into the ordinary world to the local elementary school the local middle school the local high school I was popular enough universally liked by the girls even liked when noticed by the boys though not in a romantic way I was funny haha not peculiar it was a modest currency like pennies pedestrian somewhat laborious but a currency nonetheless I was funny in public most often at my own expense education was different then and I was good at it and so I skipped grade 9 went straight from 8 to 10 which was socially a little tough at first and my fate as a disastrous math student I never learned the quadratic formula and other important tips from 9th grade math just like I missed the early dating essays and the classes and how to navigate a school dance at the time though I wasn't embarrassed about any of this not embarrassed to be thrown sink or swim into the second year of high school without so much as a map to the cafeteria or a primer on how cliques were lined up or even a list of the names of my new classmates all of whom knew one another and some of whom knew me as their little sister's friend no I was proud because I knew my parents were proud because it was an elevation and a revelation of the fact that I was special I long suspected it and now I knew for sure I was destined when you're a girl you never let on that you're proud or that you know you're better at history or biology or French than the girl who sits beside you in his 18 months older instead you gush about how good she is at putting on nail polish or at talking to boys and you roll your eyes at the vaunted difficulty of the world and say oh my god it's going to be such a disaster I am so scared and you put yourself down whenever you can so that people won't feel threatened by you so they'll like you because you wouldn't want them to know that in your heart you are proud and maybe even haughty and are driven by thoughts the revelation of which would show everyone how deeply not nice you are you learn a whole other polite way of speaking to the people who mustn't see you clearly and you know you get told by others that they think you're really sweet and good at history biology French and I'm good at this too it doesn't ever occur to you as you fashion your mask so carefully that it will grow into your skin and graft itself come to seem irremovable when you look at the boy Josh who skipped the grade alongside you and you see him wiping his nose upon his sleeve and note his physical scrawniness his chins bloom of acne next to the other 10th grade boys with broader chests and clear square jaws when you observe that he still 9th grade friends all of them boys in black t-shirts with glitter decals across the breast that say kiss or AC DC all of them with pimply chins and wet lips and hair as Lancas seaweed you cannot see any triumph in him at all he seems clearly to have lost to be lost to be a loser because anybody knows that in the challenge you were given when you skipped a grade social success modest social success to be sure but still was half the battle when Frederick Abiti invites you to join her birthday party a sale on her father's boat with six other girls two of whom are from the most popular set you feel pity for Josh who will never taste such nectar but wait nobody ever pointed out that Josh in his obliviousness was utterly happy he'd already taught himself the quadratic formula he would not be stymied in any area of academic advancement in fact he would go on to MIT and eventually become a neuro biologist with a lab largely funded by the NIH and a vast budget at his disposal he would marry a perfectly attractive if rather knock need woman and spawn several knock need bespectacled nerds replicas of himself it will all work out more than fine for him and he will never for a second suspect that it could have been otherwise he will not know there was a social test he will not know that he failed it no a sale on Frederick Abiti's father's boat was an honor that he dreamed not of and his yen for society such as it was was perfectly satisfied by his old clan now a year behind him he could no more have fashioned a mask than flown to the moon and so he remained who he was forever more femininity as masquerade indeed thank you and I'm happy to try to answer try any questions anybody might have yes sir your heroine reminds me of one of your early books that was two shorter stories together with somebody that lived downstairs and a woman who took care of somebody who went to Cuba and all kinds of outrageous art they were not they were two stories one was about the woman the housekeeper and the other was about the person in London right there was something about the housekeeper especially breaking out of what the expectations and social expectations were so I really like this I mean I see a similar feeling to it even though they're apart by what by 15 years in the writing yeah yeah probably close yeah certainly 10 now 12 yeah yeah a lot a lot apart I mean I like that same sort of feeling because it's not it enables I guess the reader to think through his or her expectations and how we fight those and kind of break out of it you know or I just like heroes like that they're kind of ordinary and yet they're not you know they're not like super heroes there's something really well thanks I mean thank you I think each you know each of us but so many moments makes choices the consequences of which we don't we we can't ever know we can't there was a lovely with my brain where was it about the lives that you know that was a poem about the lives that might have been and I can't remember where I was reading but I think that sense of of the you know I thought through Laura a series of choices that led her to this place and you know she's a school teacher it's something that she loves to do and feels she loves the kids but it's also true that it satisfies some other sense of a sort of should a sense that she should be doing good for other people that she shouldn't be living entirely for herself that I think in her case you know people sometimes say well is she just a bad artist why isn't she an artist that she doesn't have talent and I feel so there's so many in my mind at least in the case of Nora there's so many issues in play partly temperament partly circumstance partly familial background and so on and part of it is this is just a sort of unquestioned set of preconceptions among them the idea that you know you can't that just sitting in your I remember I used to love reading in bed more than anything and there was I mean I still do like I read most happily this way and there was one I used to wake up early on the weekends and lie in bed reading and there was one day my mother I sort of finally came down at 11 o'clock in the morning and my mind said oh you woke up and I said no I've been awake for hours and my mother lost her rag and she said you may not have been tiptoeing around the house and you could have been out of bed four hours and all of a sudden I was you know ever thereafter I felt guilty about lying in bed reading because because I was supposed to sort of show myself and you know empty the dishwasher or something so I think in that sense everybody you know each of us makes decisions to make the space that we can within the framework that we were given I don't know yes ma'am well I think that's I don't have the answer I think I wanted to raise the question yeah I think so I think so I mean I think I think for each I I remember being at a talk about years ago Naomi Wolfe gave if you see who she is a feminist of my generation and she's a very great sort of motivational speaker very inspiring and it was this is at the Edinburgh Festival in the UK I was living there at the time and she said we all had amazing dreams as kids didn't we what did you want to be and like somebody would go out with them I wanted to be an astronaut I wanted to be and she said I thought that many people get to be astronauts like they dismantle the space program I guess Naomi gets to be an astronaut but I think there's the voices of our culture are very contradictory and paradoxical and I think on the one hand there's some idea that we should which is a very sort of specific 20th century late capitalist North American and European idea that we should realize ourselves that we need somehow to be true to there is some authentic self to which we must be true I think in many cultures that's not a they're just saying how can we get some dinner they're not really they don't have the luxury of asking what is my authentic self but we're also given a whole we're also given a whole lot of other often unquestioned preconceptions about what is right what is good what is appropriate what is moral and so on and I think to try to it is like trying to square a circle to answer to both of those very different voices I don't know that one trumps one should trump the other I mean I think there's individual circumstances where obviously one should trump the other should I continue reading my novel or save the drowning child I feel like well it seems kind of a no brainer but I think but I think there are there are times where it's really open to question and even in something like leaving a marriage there are circumstances where is that is that going to be a realization of self is that the authentic gesture or would ultimately the authentic gesture be depends on the situation but might it in some situations be to stay and work harder at it I don't know you know why didn't she develop her artistic side I mean she was single she had no responsibilities she taught school but school's great you know it's like I don't know I think there's some school teachers some school teachers are the rest of school teachers in the she hasn't been teaching for that long and you may not remember that her mother died not that long and that she spent her she spent much of her thirties taking care of her is it four or is it two and a half four? but certainly here's the thing that four years from 42 sure but of course she had some time I'm not trying to make a defense like oh my god she had no time but I think have you done everything you wanted to do because I know I haven't tidied my TV room in six months having woken up like every Friday morning thinking and when I get home today I gotta tidy that up I mean I think there are a lot of things but also when I had children in my 30s at 34 and 37 and before I had kids I was young it was great I was young and I would teach class and at the end of class the students would say should we go for a drink and you know you'd hang out and have a good time and then I you know I had a baby and I was busy and then I had another baby and I was busy and for a while I wasn't teaching and then I went back to teaching and I didn't really feel that I was that different but there was a moment at the end of the class when the students said well night and I realized oh I'm not young anymore and I think that's something that's happened for her is some sense that she was deferring possibility and then suddenly it doesn't feel possible which doesn't mean it isn't possible right it's not what happens it's what you think happens that matters and the thing about the year with Serena is that suddenly it all feels possible again but it's attached misguidedly her therapist might say if she had one it's attached to those people so that when they go she thinks possibility is leaving with them which is again I think a lot of us at various times invest other people whether in our families or elsewhere with more power when I met my mother-in-law for the first time having heard what a terrifying creature she was and how much my husband to be feared her judgment and then this woman appeared who was like five foot two and seemed perfectly sweet I was totally mystified I was like really that's the scary person but to him she remained terrifying always so I think what you invest people with power that they don't objectively necessarily have and then you think things are possible or not possible because of the stories in your head there are people who are amazingly unblocked and fill a day with a thousand things it's incredible but not many people are unblocked most of us are blocked somehow I think I got a question she greatly affected by taking care of her mother through her long illness and I'm not quite sure whether she resented that or that gave her feeling of purpose where was her father doing the illness she never mentioned whether he took any part in helping out with the mother but he didn't resent that she was the one who was doing it and what was the feeling is it not possible to both be find it gives you a sense of purpose and somewhat to resent it isn't it possible for both of those things to be true and her that I think you can feel this is the most important thing I should save that drowning child I'm going to get up and say that drowning child but I was at a really good place in my book and I'm kind of bummed that I have to leave it I think it's possible to feel both things and certainly in my mind her father was present and certainly part of taking care of her mom but it's a big job I don't know if any of you saw that film Amour that got so much attention by Hanukkah is that his name, is that who made it but it's about an aging couple where the woman gets quite ill and the husband she stays home and the husband is taking care of her and all the reviews said amazing but it's so harsh, it's so dark and I had just come through taking care of my parents through their final illnesses and I thought no, no, no, no this is way makes it look way too easy but that she's going to have to have pardon me a diaper change like numerous times a day here and that doesn't seem to feature in the film is he doing that, is he lifting her up and it didn't come into it I think there's plenty when somebody is elderly and not well or is a baby, I mean either way when somebody needs really full on care there's enough to go around for dad and daughter both yeah yes ma'am I am one of those teachers I was made very uncomfortable by the steps that she took with great Reza I mean baby sitting for him they're practically moving into their house she doesn't move into their house it seemed like their lives were so intertwined it was like almost like they were a family and I found that so big he really excuse me out any school district they would be like sure but it is something that happens I was talking about this earlier with Adam routinely when our kids were small we didn't ever but the kindergarten, nursery and kindergarten teachers routinely babies out with the kids by third grade it doesn't happen much anymore but routinely not for our kids oh that explains it I'm sorry in the real world I'm sorry I mean it was absolutely I was like I mean I really right I understand that you didn't believe it well it's good to know you don't love them enough to take care of them yes ma'am well I think it seemed unlikely that she would lose them well I think people do things accidentally on purpose you know the oh I broke it accidentally I'm so sorry these things happen and I think in my mind what it would mean to her for the gifts to be meaningful is so it means so much for her that they'd be meaningful that if they're not meaningful if they're just things that were in the house that he was getting rid of then she can't bear it so it's actually better for her not to know then it becomes something she can imagine rather than something that she has to become somebody from the back so obviously she ought to know what would be the back well just it's like the thing was she resentful to take care of her mother or pleased to do it both things can be true I think a lot of the time we have ambivalent feelings and on the one hand it's unbearable I mean there's a really interesting book that I read last summer by an author with an Irish name it's not going to help you it's all in your head I think and she's a neurologist and it's about actually this complicated notion of holistic disease so she treats a number of people who have seizures there's no question they have seizures but you may well have organic causes for the seizures she treats those patients also but they can trace through your brain waves whether your brain is actually having a forced into a seizure or whether there's no change in the brain waves and she's looking at patients who have no change in the brain waves they're experiencing seizures but you cannot find an organic cause for it and in those cases she follows sometimes she finds an answer and sometimes she doesn't but there are often people who are there's a trigger of some trauma that they actually cannot acknowledge or confront that they may not even know they may not even have a conscious memory of the trauma or something like that I'm not a scientist so but yes I mean I think that's sort of what she's saying but I have to say that there are that our brains are very complicated and there are things that we cannot allow ourselves to know that some part of our brain is protecting us from knowing and might protect us in very dramatic ways well to my soul but not 59 so they never found out what I'm a cause of mind oh dear I'm sorry I'm used to I don't know what causes mind whether it's a lack of sleep or whatever so I'm a I'm used to them but I've been on medication all my life does the medication help? yes it does see that's another thing is that if there isn't an organic cause the medication doesn't help it doesn't help in its focus yeah so yeah she never seemed to give herself credit for being a good teacher I couldn't figure that out because I was a teacher then a guidance counselor and the one thing she never seemed to say I'm really good as a teacher I don't think she says she's very good at much though I don't think she spends time thinking she's good at much though well you're right about that and I couldn't figure that out I guess that was her way she knows what she gets but she does know what she gets yeah but she doesn't think that's a great thing which is a tremendous thing and she never really felt that was something that she was accomplishing I guess you want to be an artist you're saying it's a good girl thing it's a good girl thing I'm sorry to the teachers it's a good girl thing to be a teacher that was what a girl was supposed to do then those are one of the professions she's a good girl and she was the good girl but also the same girl because if she did her art and set it out she was putting herself completely in front of people and that's a hard thing to do but she did say that she's a good teacher and that she gets kids and those people who end up being principals act like they get kids but they don't really get kids and they want to be a teacher like herself you seem to she does have that excuse me yes you get to writing that you do as opposed to non-fiction making a choice or a story to be more about you putting yourself out there and choosing your character to be picked up as a writer how did you develop this side I think it was almost it was a choice I made so early that it wasn't even conscious I was that annoying kid who from the moment I realized that the stories that I got read at bedtime were made up I thought you can do that that's the thing you can do I want to do that so I remember I worked briefly I've done a lot of freelance journalism over the years but I worked briefly at a newspaper in London and I it seemed like you could you know there are all those journalists like James Fry is that his name who we were talking about earlier there are a whole lot of them who just make junk up I was listening on NPR just the other day there's a whole series of it was an article in Science Magazine about surveys done door to door about people's opinions about LGBT and then they were just made up and in fact he made up incredible little anecdotes about the people he'd supposedly interviewed when he hadn't really interviewed anybody and I have to say that makes total sense to me it's why I shouldn't be a journalist because I feel like you need some data make it up why not, it's so much more interesting make it up so it seems just a matter of ethics that I have to stick to the fiction side yes ma'am I think both things are perhaps true I feel like she's maybe is she gay? I don't know but I feel like she certainly feels in its intensity more than a more than friendship but she sort of feels that about the husband too so she's certainly bisexual I feel like I don't know what a young woman told me she was pansexual I was like what does that mean? I don't know what all the choices are certainly let's say she's bisexual and that kind of rustle going what is that? let's discuss pansexuality next two hours we'll be here for some time but I think it is also true that the thing that I'm love friendship is desire it isn't sexual desire but it's desire you rarely when you meet somebody and you think I want to be friends with her and it's rarely because you think they're dull, hideous stupid and mean it's because there's something that you find attractive and possibly enviable that you think she knows so much about art history or a great dancer or whatever it is and so there is that element too that she is in love with their life their whole life seems to her enviable I think it's so interesting what seems glamorous to her that's part of it doesn't make them good people yes ma'am it always has to be some version of the latter because you can't imagine what you can't imagine what you can imagine is limited by who you are so there are things I can't imagine there are novels that Joyce Carol Oates has written that she has an imagination that can go places my imagination cannot she wrote that novel about the serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer I feel like I couldn't imagine I don't think I could imagine myself there I couldn't put my mind into his head I don't think I could do that each of us has a different and the parameters of what we can imagine are some combination of temperament and experience so in that sense you know but I I think it isn't I'm trying to think if there's anything in any of my books that's strictly autobiographical I feel like places I often sometimes places are imaginary but sometimes places are actual little bits I was saying to the students earlier there's a character called Didi who's a friend of Nora's who was based in my mind on the friend of a friend of mine who I didn't really know very well and only know a little bit better now but I projected all sorts of things I had a whole sense of this is what this person is like and I felt free to her name is not Didi I felt free to kind of she has a different job she's different in lots of ways but I felt free to kind of imagine her but you know I had a the writer Colin Toy Bean once said you can make up the story or you can make up the people but you can't make up both which I find I spend a lot of time thinking is that true is that true maybe it's true I don't know I don't know but I think what he was saying is you have to be grounded somewhere and maybe that's true you know it is that magpie thing it's little different pieces I mean partly the interior life thing I wanted to write about partly women and art I wanted to write about partly partly partly the idea that you know people I was saying this to the class earlier that we sometimes take we pin a complex story on little evidence that what it is to live inside your head is to have a lot more freedom to and the example I was giving is you know you might at university have an interaction with somebody and think oh he definitely fancies me yeah yeah he said like he's waiting for me to come to the party you know and then you come home and tell your roommate what happened and she says no that doesn't mean he likes you at all right I mean that there's some way in which we can sometimes on the strength of very few very little very little concrete evidence we can make a whole story in our heads so I wanted to write about that so there were lots of different elements going to the studio to meet Nora that day when she wasn't there that first time I don't know what do you think I don't think so cause I'm a she thought it might be Serena but Serena would have had the key to get in that's right but she thought but he thought that Serena would be there he messed up cause he thought Serena would be there he didn't come there on purpose the first time I mean he didn't come on purpose to see Nora the first time as I recall yes I am do you remember the striking stance when that happened what you were doing or trying to do that was there some process you go through what that happens to you or did it just happen um well I was I wrote it down so it must have been at a time when I was pretending to write um more than that I can't you know I can't remember whether it sort of came in between other throwoutable eminently ditchable efforts or whether it was on its own but certainly I think I mean I would say that it was interesting I wrote this book largely when my parents were dying and um and I was interested to discover that in the time when he wrote notes from underground uh Dostoevsky lost his brother and his wife in the six months in which he wrote that he lost his brother and his wife to tuberculosis um and he was very close to his brother and they published a magazine together and I feel as though there was some way I mean I have a terrible memory anyway but partly there's a whole you know some long stretches of my life that are somewhat blurry and my attention was on other things and I can tell you a lot about the hospital rooms but I can't tell you about much else um but I think that the intensity of the emotion is transferred emotion from other things I think and it sort of kept me even though she was fairly you know uh emotional it kept me saying to write about her oh that answers the question oh well my hope, thank you, my hope it's interesting because I feel people have much have quite strong reactions to her often and I was saying to Adam that before the book had even come out there was a sort of publishers thing where there were booksellers and people from the publishing house and a woman came out to me and said Nora is me, that is me um I'm so glad you wrote this book thank you and then sort of 15 minutes later there was a woman who came up and said why did you write this book, this one is so gasly she's awful, she's such a minor who would who would ever read this I mean I'm a feminist I don't want to read this and I certainly don't want to give it to my daughter to read she said and I felt like saying um excuse me you should meet that lady you guys need to talk but I didn't, I didn't blow the cover of lady number one but but my hope would be my hope would be that it's not about what you think about her I would, my hope would be that um that you believe in her even if you hate her or she drives you nuts that would be my hope so I'll let her do the other books for sale here Maggie's back there with the petitions there's food, drinks thank you all for coming


So I want to introduce Dr. Dana Bachman. He coordinates the SOFIA's outreach program at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. He's also the lead for the NASA Airborne Astronomy Ambassadors Program at the SETI Institute. Some of you may have had an opportunity to fly. It used to be that it was strictly educators, but a couple of years ago, I think, for one of the cohorts, and maybe Dana could mention this, that they had opened it up where some of the amateur astronomers could qualify as the partner for the classroom teacher to be able to fly. And so some of you on this call, on this webinar, may have even been half-long. And so if you were, let us know in the chat window, and so that we can give you a call out as having had that opportunity. Before joining the SOFIA team, he was a professor of physics and astronomy at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania. He's also the co-author of three college-level astronomy textbooks and a frequent speaker on astronomy in SOFIA. His research specialty is planetary system formation in the history of the solar system. Please welcome Dr. Dana Bachman. I'm muted. I'm hoping everyone can hear me. So I have a couple of meta announcements. One is I'm getting over bronchitis, and so I might have, I hope I don't. Oh, there we go. I might have some coughing fits. I will try to be careful. But that leads me to ask Brian. If you save all the questions to the end, I might not have any voice to answer them with. So could I maybe trust you to sort of field the questions and say, here's one. Maybe it could be answered now. I don't mind being interrupted to answer a question as I go along. It's probably better than saving them for the end. OK. And if you open up your Q&A window, you have access to that as well. And you could perhaps see them and answer them as you see them, or I could monitor it. If I'm blasting along, giving the talk, I might not paying attention to the Q&A window. So if you can. OK. I will prompt you. OK. OK. It might give you a nice break, too, so. Yeah, that's right. OK. The other point is that, well, the slides I'm showing, some of them were at the Sophia Scientific staff showed a brief to their colleagues at the International Astronomical Union with some of these slides. So these are not, excuse me, these are not public level slides. Some of them are full scientific briefing level, which I think a lot of you are fine with. But that might lead to some questions. So now I'm going to dare to try to fire up my slide set here. We had some fun getting this to work beforehand. So hang on just a second. So I should be, you should be, if I go do this, share screen. I hope you are seeing, I'll take it that if Brian is seeing, Brian and David are seeing this slide show that you all are. Yep. It is looking great. OK. So I'm, as Brian said, I'm the lead for the Sophia outreach effort. I'm trained as an astronomer. But my great delight is training high school teachers to go on board Sophia. And unfortunately, Brian had the chronology backwards. We used to bring amateur astronomers and informal educators such as museum docents on with the teachers. And this year, NASA asked us to change our paradigm. And so for a while, we're just doing high school teachers. I'm hoping that that gets reversed in a couple of years. But right now, it's the next two cohorts, the next two years worth of teachers on Sophia will be limited to high school science teachers, which will do what we're told. But it was a lot of fun with the wider sample of people. Anyway, so I sit at NASA Ames, which is my office, which is about 40 miles from where Brian and David's office is. But I am an employee of the City Institute. So we have a pretty complicated work chart. Now you see on Sophia here, this was one of the first open door test flights from a chase plane.  You can see the secondary support structure and the secondary. The door rolls back. It does not all go all the way to the zenith. So we're always looking out the port side, the left side of the plane, between elevations of between 20 and 60 degrees above the horizon. On the tail, you see NASA's logo, which also see the German space agency's logo, DLR. Sophia is a 20% German, 80% US project. So now I'll go on to the next slide. This is a plot of atmospheric opacity versus wavelength. And as you know, there's a visual window. There's sort of a near-infrared window, but it's partly chopped up. And then the far-infrared, mid- and far-infrared are mostly blocked. And then the radio window opens up at radio wavelengths. So at the short wavelengths, it's ozone that's doing the blocking at the longer wavelengths infrared and mid- and far-infrared. It's mostly water vapor that's doing the blocking. So the cure for this is you can spend a lot of money and send up a space telescope, or you can try a small, modest-sized telescope in an aircraft. This was suggested by Gerard Kuiper, the astronomer who was, for several decades, the only planetary astronomer working, and was Carl Sagan's PhD advisor at the University of Chicago. So we had a 10-inch telescope in a Learjet, which did some famous work, actually. It was the 10-inch infrared telescope on the Learjet that discovered that Jupiter is emitting more heat than it's receiving from the sun. It was good work. The Kuiper Airborne Observatory was its successor. It operated from 1975 to 1995 with a 0.9-meter telescope and a C-141 cargo jet. And it was based here at NASA Ames. And then Sophia is the successor, of course, to the Kuiper. There was a longer gap. Why is anybody surprised? Then the astronaut of a community wanted between the Kuiper being decommissioned and Sophia being commissioned. There was almost a 15-year gap, which was supposed to have been only five years. And now Sophia is operating. And by getting above 40,000 feet, we're above 99.9% of the water vapor. And we have 80% of the reception of mid- and far-infrared that a space telescope would have. And it comes home every morning. So as I said, it's a 2.5-meter telescope in a Boeing 747SP. That's a special model of the 747 that Boeing made, only 40 of them, which had a short fuselage, low passenger load, and long distance capacity for, like, New York to Tokyo non-stops. Now it turned out that that wasn't the right price for the right passenger load that the airlines wanted. And so they did stop making them. But it was perfect for us. So we bought this used from United Airlines and chopped it, and then installed the 17-ton telescope. 17 tons is the moving piece behind a bulkhead at the tail of the plane. And it's based at NASA's facility in Southern California. It used to be called NASA Dryden. It was renamed after Neil Armstrong a couple years ago. But the mission science center is at NASA Ames in Northern California on the principle that you should put these things in as many congressional districts as you possibly can. So this has 20% share with the German Space Agency. They supply 20% of the funding. They bought the high-performance engines. They built the telescope. And 20% of the staff are German. And 20% of the observing time roughly goes to German astronomers. So oops, sorry. First science flight was in 2010. Excuse me. We're ramping up to 120 science flights per year. We've got to, I think, 70 last year. So we're most of the way up to full capacity, not all the way. And we spend two to five weeks, actually, in the Southern Hemisphere based at Christchurch, New Zealand, in the Southern Hemisphere winter for Southern Hemisphere observations. Here's a cross-section of SOFIA. And those of you who've been on it will recognize this fondly. There's a bulkhead here separating the cabin, which is a short-sleeve environment from the telescope. So we don't send anybody back here except grad students. I'm kidding. The telescope here, shown as a liquid nitrogen system to chill the telescope framework, which we've decided is not worth it. So this is actually not being installed. It doesn't save the time that we thought it was going to save for getting the telescope to thermal equilibrium with the stratosphere. So here are our workstation, telescope operators, science workstations, and educators that I take up along with two of my colleagues in rotation here at this station, pilot crew, and so on. The instrument is mounted here, camera or spectrograph, where it can be accessed from inside the cabin. So it's a Nesmith-focused telescope, primary to secondary to tertiary, down the tube through the bulkhead, down this tube, and then to the instrument, whatever it is, that's mounted there. We leave one instrument on for a campaign of one to three weeks worth the flight, because it's a full-day operation to take one of these things. They're usually in the range of 300 to 500 kilogram instruments. So they're non-trivial to take off and put on. So we leave one on for several week campaigns at a time. Here's a view on board. And the illusion is that you're looking forward, but we're looking backward to the stern of the plane. This happens to be the Cornell, excuse me, mid-infrared camera, this red cryostat, and its electronics. The telescope is behind the bulkhead. Here is a counterweight. Sorry. Anyway, so this is the science team here and telescope operators, and this was taken from the educator console. I was peering over this to take this picture of everybody happily at work at middle of the night. So that'd be 20 to 25 people on board at night, including the pilot crew. Here are four of the instruments. There's a high-speed photometer built by Lowell Observatory that's shown mounted on Sophia. Here is the near-infrared camera, which has spectroscopic capabilities built at UCLA. It's shown here at Lick Observatory near San Jose. This is that forecast, the Cornell mid-IR camera, which also has spectroscopic imaging capability. And here's the great German far-infrared spectrometer built by the Max Plunk Institute. And this one, it can't be used from the ground. It's the wavelengths. It works out or completely blocked from the ground. So its first operational test, other than in the lab, was when it was put on Sophia for the first time. So here's a plot. Might be illuminating. It's a little squished so I could get both of the plots on the same page. But this is wavelength of observation versus spectral resolution, how finely divided the spectrum is. And of course, the spectrum, the imagers, the cameras do not have much spectral resolution. They're broadband. But the great instrument goes up to 10 to the 8th. I see question and answer. Can an amateur astronomer like an NSN member submit a proposal for time on Sophia? Should spell that with an F, S-O-F-I-A, 99. How would this be done?  Any limitations on what would qualify? Any astronomer, credentialed astronomer, so a PhD astronomer, you would need to be to apply, but you could find one to help you submit a proposal. So you could collaborate with an astronomer. Any astronomer in the world can apply for time on Sophia. But only if you're German or US do you get government dollars to execute your observing program, let's say. So it's a yearly call for proposals like the Hubble Space Telescope or other space telescopes. And then they're judged by a peer review panel. So being a member of the Night Sky Network would not disqualify you, but you should team up with an academic astronomer, either US or German, to collaborate on the proposal. And that would ensure the consideration of it. But there's no exclusion principle. Anybody can apply, and then they're peer reviewed. Yeah. Dana, I'm going to give you just a moment to break here and mention that I was looking for something else today and came across a PACA program, P-A-C-A, Professional Amateur Collaborate of Astronomy. And there is this organization that I'm not sure where it's sourced out of. But I found it because I was looking for an eclipse project that was funded by NASA. And they're actually doing some science things with collaborations between professional and amateur astronomers. OK. So I'll just spend another minute, less than a minute, more on this slide. But I guess in some sort of ideal, the footprints of all of our instruments would cover this diagram. But the instruments that have been chosen for construction for Sophia cover different spectral resolutions and different wavelength ranges so as to be able to study very different astrophysical phenomena. And the great instrument, look, it has a maximum spectral resolution of 10 to the eighth, which means that it would be capable of distinguishing three meter per second Doppler shifts, which is pretty amazing. Anyway, our wavelength range then is from the hippo instrument, which is UV just into the near UV all the way to the mid-infrared at 300 or so microns wavelength. Now, if you'll see a plot of how opaque the Earth's atmosphere is, from Monacaia, which where I did my graduate work and is considered a fine observing site, as you all know, nevertheless, the infrared is chopped up by a carbon dioxide ozone and water vapor. This is mostly lost to water vapor from 30 microns to 300 microns wavelength. But at Sophia's altitude of 12 to 14 kilometers, you're only seeing the ozone line, which you can't. No, let's see, that's carbon dioxide. This is ozone. Can't get rid of that because we're below the ozone layer. The water vapor lines go almost completely away. So that 80% number I gave you is sort of the average just drawing a line across here. We're getting 80% of the radiation reaching the top of the Earth's atmosphere across this range that even high mountain tops on Earth can't reach. OK, so what was I going to do here? I might have shown. I was going to show a movie. Let me do this, all right? So I'm going to dare to unshare my screen. Uh-oh. Let's see. Hang on. OK, a new share. No. Let's see. Hang on. We break new share. So I don't know if everybody's seeing a grainy video from a chase. Yeah, I'll see you good. Where's the door opening? We open at altitude. We don't open until we're at altitude. And we don't open it if the sun's above the horizon in general. Although for the first time last week, for the first time last week, we observed with the sun still above the horizon looking at Venus. And that was the first time we had violated that policy constraint. OK, let me see. OK, so now are we looking at Jupiter? Thumbs up from David. So in fact, this is the very first astronomical image made by Sophia on May 2010. This is a nearly contemporary, a few weeks earlier, but the same longitudes, roughly, of Jupiter. This is the infrared image combining 5.424 and 37 microns wavelength. Now, I expect everyone's familiar with the idea that Jupiter gives off more heat than it receives from the sun as what discovered by the Learjet, an experiment on the Learjet. But this image shows for sure that it's not isotropic, that the heat upwelling is limited, excuse me, to certain latitude bands. This latitude band here that's showing outpouring of heat from the interior is the same band that's showing the organic reddish brown organics upwelling from the interior where they've been cooked up. So you don't know everything that's going on Jupiter, unless you compare the visible image showing you the organics from inside with the heat map. That's really some real information there. Excuse me. Here is a spectral map, two spectral maps actually of Jupiter at 17 microns and 28.3 microns. These are emission lines of ortho and para-hydrogen. These are two forms of the hydrogen molecule in which the proton is spinning either. The two protons of the two atoms in the molecule are spinning either parallel to each other or anti-parallel to each other and the anti-parallel state is lower energy. And what this does, the ratio of the two forms of molecular hydrogen gives the thermal history of the gas because the two forms don't relax into each other on a short time scale. So it takes a long time to come back to equilibrium. So you can look at the ratio of some material and see what its temperature was years ago before the upwelling started. So that's really a very impressive piece of astrophysics. Looking at the thermal history of the gas that's now in Jupiter's atmosphere that's come from the interior of the planet, this was done using the X-E's instrument with a resolution of 55,000. That means that's the spectral pixels, so to speak, over 155,000th of the wavelength that were being observed. Here is now Mars, a spectrum of Mars. So at 7.2 microns where you can see the lines of, you see these are marked here. There's carbon dioxide, that's not exciting. But there's deuterated water. So it's a water molecule where one of the hydrogens is heavy hydrogen deuterium. And this is regular water, and this is deuterated water. And so the ratio of those two gives you the history of the water in the atmosphere of Mars because the water is destroyed by ultraviolet. The ultraviolet photons from the sun crack the water molecules and the hydrogen escape into space, and the oxygen rusts the rocks. But the heavy hydrogen deuterium escapes more slowly than the light hydrogen, regular hydrogen, which is called proteome. There's the obscure fact that regular hydrogen is called proteome. So the abundance of deuterium is it's overabundant relative to cosmic abundances in Mars' atmosphere, which is indications of fossil water destroyed. The amount of overabundance tells you that there was a certain amount of water, in fact, enough to make an ocean that's been destroyed. And the deuterium has been left behind as the fossil of the escape hydrogen. So this is pretty cool. We had all sorts of evidence, of course, that there's a wet or Mars, but to have this atmospheric evidence, which lets you do some bookkeeping about how much water has been lost, is very interesting that result. Sorry.  And as a result, we can measure some of the properties of the foreground object. In this case, you're seeing Uranus's rings passing in front of a background star. This is how Uranus's rings were discovered by the Kuiper Airborne Observatory, Sophia's predecessor. So as the star, from our point of view, as the rings crossed in front of the star, there were these dropouts, which were symmetric, more or less, around the planet. This experiment was to measure the properties of Uranus's atmosphere. They weren't expecting to find the rings, what they sure did. And so some of those experimenters built one of those long ago Kuiper experimenters, built the high-speed photometer for Sophia that's used for occultation work on Sophia. And now, we had in 2015, there was a Pluto occultation. And here is the ground track, the center of the track, and the edges of the tracks of the different distance between this line and this line is actually the diameter of Pluto, which you see is about the size of Australia. Pretty much, it went right across New Zealand on a day when Sophia was in New Zealand. I mean, could you ask for better than that? So this dashed line is the three standard deviation uncertainty in the northern edge of the track. So what we were getting data from MIT the afternoon of the occultation so that we could refine Sophia's flight path to try and hit the center of the occultation track. And there's a particular reason that you would like to be in the center that I'll show in a moment. But the position of Pluto was not well known to even like 100 kilometers precision before this. This is three weeks before New Horizons arrived. And the experiment was partly to pioneer to make some measurements that might help the New Horizons people. And here was the 2011 Pluto occultation light curve where there's this little bump in the middle. And I was actually on this flight fortunate to have been on it. And this bump in the center is what's called the central flash when the Pluto's atmosphere is lit as a ring by the star directly behind Pluto. So you have to have Sophia, Pluto, and the star mutually centered perfectly to a precision of the sort of thickness of the atmosphere or a few tens of kilometers. And then you can see a central flash for a few seconds as the star lights up of the planet's atmosphere in the ring, the dwarf planets. This decrease and increase are gentler than they would be if Pluto didn't have an atmosphere. It would drop faster and come drop faster and come back up faster.  Now remember that this is one of Sophia's instruments on the 2015 occultation. We were within 25 kilometers of the shadow track center because of the updates we were receiving on the day of the occultation. Michael Persson from MIT and Jurgen Wolf from the German Sophia Institute were respectively the PIs of the two instruments that were making these observations. This happens to be from the Germans instrument because they let me have it first. But here is Pluto and the star not resolved. This is actually both objects looking like one object, but Pluto has not covered up the star. In this picture Pluto has covered up the star and you're only seeing Pluto. Let's see. OK, look at that central flash. That was the central flash in 2015 relative to the central flash in 2011. And we are sure that we are on the center of the track in this one or close enough. And again here, so the central flash was much more pronounced in 2015 and 2011 indicating that the atmosphere was more extensive in 2015 and 2011, which was a big puzzle until the New Horizons got there three weeks later and showed that Pluto is a geologically active world with apparently an atmosphere that has input to it from some sort of subsurface volcanism or something. Now let me go to a little movie of that and see if I can get that to happen. OK. Whoops, whoopsie doozy. Sophia taking off from Christchurch, New Zealand airport. There's the folks on board. And you'll see Pluto hide the star. It's dimmed. Now look for the central flash. Blink, there it is. So this is speeded up by a factor of 10. That was three minutes compressed into about 20 seconds. So astronomers get excited by little blinking dots. And you do too. There you go again. Blink, yeah. Central flash, very pronounced, very easy to see just by eye, central flash. Let's see. So now can I do this one more time? OK, share screen. OK, am I back to showing the, yes, good deal, all right. And as you come back, Laurie had a question. OK. And she says that Uranus is her favorite planet in the solar system. And I was actually wondering this too, because the central part of the graph that you had there was chopped off. And she was wondering how many miles or kilometers apart between Uranus and its rails. It's about, they're within the Roche radius, which is 2 and 1 half planetary radii. I think they're like twice the radius to planet away. So that's like of order. Let's see, it's bigger than Earth. It's something like 30,000, 40,000 kilometers, roughly speaking. Yeah, I don't hope that answers the question. But they're within the Roche radius, which is 2 and 1 half times the radius of the planet. So here's some of the close-ups of Pluto showing evidence of material coming from the inside and covering up terrain. So something's going on in Pluto. And that's a real puzzle if you're following this, because Pluto's way too small and there to be residual heat of formation. And the amount of radioactive substances should not be enough to be producing this kind of activity. But the tidal interactions with tyron are not enough either. Now how am I doing for time? Oh, I see a question. On the right side of the 2015 Pluto light curve has some streaks, whereas the left side does not. Does this mean anything? Let me go look, I'm not sure. Those, you mean these things here? I, those could be noise spikes. Or let me think, I want to be sure that I'm not making a misstatement here. These are reductions in the cut. So these are high low opacity pieces of the atmosphere. My guess is those are noise spikes, rather than anything significant. But I could be wrong about that. So I have now, I'm leaving the solar system and showing some of Sophia's results on stars and star formation. There is a protostar in the roo-o-o-fugee star forming region that is used as a backlight. So it's just a light source behind some of the nebular material that let Sophia, using the great spectrometer, identify deuterated hydroxyls. So instead of OH, it's OD. This is the absorption line. Now these folks think like radio astronomers. In fact, you can think of the great spectrometer on Sophia as being the highest frequency radio receiver that's not in a lab. It receives at 1 to 4 gigahertz. No, sorry, terahertz. Let's see. This should say terahertz. Yeah, so 1.4 terahertz. 1,391 gigahertz. So the great spectrometer is a radio receiver, whereas all of the other instruments on Sophia are pixel detectors, photo-event, photoelectric detectors converting photons to electrons. This is a radio receiver detecting the wave nature. So these two molecules were found by Sophia. Of course, these molecules can be found in a lab on Earth, but this is the first time they've been found in the ISM. And that adds to a list of, I don't know, 75 or 100-ish molecules already known. So it's a modest contribution, but why they're interesting is they're part of the chemical pathways leading to, as it says here, water and organic molecules. So that's the ultimate question operating in that this experiment was investigating was. What kind of chemistry goes on in interstellar clouds even before planets form? What kind of organic stuff could have formed in the cloud from which Earth and the Sun formed and actually gotten organic synthesis underway before there was even a solid Earth? Here's an image of the star-forming region, Westerhoek III in Perseus. Westerhoek was a Dutch radio astronomer who made a catalog of H2 regions, ionized hydrogen regions. And this one has a massive star cluster. Now, this is the Spitzer image. The Spitzer had a 0.85-meter telescope, and it was a space telescope. So it was cryogenically cooled. It was awesomely sensitive. It was so sensitive that W3 burned it out. And so with Sophia, which you would think being less sensitive is never good, but by being less sensitive, by being not chilled to zero Kelvin before Kelvin, but rather operating at stratospheric temperatures of 200 to 220 Kelvin, we're less sensitive. And we have a three times bigger telescope so that we have higher spatial resolution. And so we can look at the burned out, what Spitzer could only see as a burned out bright area, and see the structure around the protostars and the individual protostars in this cloud, separating them from each other. So this is just an experiment to see what the morphology, the shapes of clusters of newborn stars are like, how they are. They're associated to how they affect the surrounding medium. Here is an image of, this is a Spitzer Space Telescope image of the center of the Orion Nebula around the trapezium. This is a Phi-Phi-Ls, Sophia's imaging spectrometer. Images of pieces of that at wavelengths of 63, 145, 157 microns, looking at neutral oxygen, neutral oxygen, and ionized carbon. These are spectral lines that allow, these wavelengths are the wavelengths of spectral lines that allow the energy to leak out of collapsing interstellar clouds, hastening the collapse. So these are part of the energy budget of star formation. If these lines didn't exist, if the energy couldn't leak out from the interior of the clouds and escape to space, the clouds would perhaps be in equilibrium and wouldn't collapse. But this is like these lines operate as drains that pull the plug out from the centers of these collapsing protostellar clouds and they're by hastening the collapse process. There's another, so this is ortho versus para H2D plus. So there's a weird molecule. It's a triple hydrogen, which has got two regular hydrogens and a sort of a deuterium taped on to it. And then we have ortho and para versions of it. And this is, the ratio gives the two types of hydrogens. The ratio gives the time since equilibrium between these two forms of the molecule were established. In other words, there's a molecular clock that tells you the age of material and lets us get an age of the star an independent way. Instead of just an estimate or a model, this gives an age of the cloud that's forming this protostar, which has just a telephone number for a name. So it's an age of greater than 10 to the sixth years, which actually was a surprise. They were expecting 10 to the five years based on other estimates. So this shows that some of the knowledge of the details of star formation are not settled yet. This cloud was at least 10 times older than it was thought to be given the state that it's in for the stage that the protostars embedded in it are. OK, let's see. Can I get another move on to another one? I think I'm going to skip that one. Well, no, I won't. This is actually, there's an observation with the great instrument where everybody knows that stars form by collapsing interstellar clouds. Yes, right. That's what everybody knows. But actually catching a cloud in the act of collapsing is very difficult because the stage is so short, astronomically speaking. It's only 10 to the five years, the freefall collapse stage, that it's very rare to find an object in that short, astronomically short stage. Statistically, you just have to examine thousands of objects before you find one that's in that brief stage before the slower contraction stage sets in of a protostar. But so that's what was done here. This was an observation by Sophia that added, let's see, I think six collapsing objects to a catalog totaling about 12 before this experiment was done. So now we're up to only 18 protostullar clouds where we're watching them collapse rather than inferring that they did collapse or inferring that they're about to collapse. That's pretty cool. This is a planetary nebula, the butterfly nebula. And here is a Hubble Space Telescope picture, which shows basically the emission from the gas. And this is the Sophia image where the different pieces of it are corresponded to each other. This shows emission from the dust that's condensing in the gas. So although, I guess you could say, well, I'm looking at sort of the same thing. Look at how huge Sophia's spatial resolution is at these long wavelengths. Hubble and Sophia are virtually the same size, 2 and 1 half meter telescopes. In fact, we like to point out we're slightly larger than Hubble someday, though. Excuse me, that won't matter. But at a wavelength of, let's say, half of my ikran, visible light, this is Hubble's spatial resolution, diffraction limited. And this is Sophia's spatial resolution at 20 to 30 microns. That's the best we can do. That's a point source at the central star. Anyway, what you're looking at here is the outflow from this object, this evolved object, a post-bain sequence star, the gas flowing out of it into space rejoining the interstellar medium and the dust condensing, the solid particles, which will then be, perhaps, incorporated into the future generations of planets. Let's see, this is another image of a different planetary nebula, the NGC7027. And this is an oxygen spectral image. So this is an image in the emission of oxygen atoms at this wavelength. And what this is showing, by stepping through different wavelengths, through different velocities, you get the structure of the motions in the expanding cloud, the expanding planetary nebula. That's been exhaled by a dying sort of solar mass star.  This is the spectral resolution. I mean, spatial resolution. Sorry, I'm the Sophia instrument at this tremendously long wavelength. It's like, it's basically wavelength in microns divided by 10 is your arc seconds of spatial resolution. So it's like six arc second beam here. OK, now I know I'm running out of time. This is one of my favorite images from Sophia of all. This is a Hubble image of the center of the galaxy. The scale here is just a few parsecs. This is the center cluster. So it's a star cluster with about 2 million, a few million. I'm forgetting the right number, of stars bunched up in a parsec. Imagine what the night sky looks like here at this very center of the galaxy. Now, my PhD advisor, Eric Becklin, discovered the center of the galaxy by scanning over with a near infrared detector, scanning over the whole Sagittarius region and finding where the stars peaked up in their density. And that was his PhD thesis back in 1968. Well, so we know where the center of the galaxy is to a high precision from that. And right in the center there is Sagittarius A star, this unique radio source that's associated with. That's now understood to be a supermassive black hole. Barry Fitzgerald asked, how often do you refocus during these imaging sessions, being that temperature, I would guess, remains somewhat. We refocus a few times during the night. The temperature of the telescope, as it reaches equilibrium, of course, changes the metric of the telescope. So we do have to refocus. But as a point that you might not realize is with the infrared imagery, the sky is glowing. The brightness of the night sky at 10 microns is minus 1 magnitude per square arc second. There's a serious worth of brightness per square arc second of the night sky. And we're trying to pick out the objects behind that. So our exposure times are fractions of a second. And then we stack those images later. We fill up the wells and the detectors if we went for any amount of time. So we're taking bursts of hundreds of images in a fraction of a minute, less than a minute, stopping. And then if you need a refocus, you can just do that quickly. So refocusing is not long, long, long integrations. We do that sometimes with the spectrometers. But with the imagers, typical exposure time is a 10th of a second on Sophia. Oops, sorry. So I wanted to show this. This is what Sophia sees at 2032 and 37 microns. Wow, I don't see anything in common between these two pictures, do you? Oh, well, actually, look now.  The center cluster is a couple of million solar masses and the center black hole is about 4 million. So this is orbiting that and the white white, excuse me, material stripped off the inside of the torus and pouring down into the central supermassive black holes. It's hotter than the rest of the material and it's, you can see it there. Can you see signs of the denser parts of the torus as obscurations around here? I'm running my cursor in the Hubble image, which is the same scale as the Sophia image. And you can see some of the star field is partly blacked out. That's the denser parts of this torus. If you didn't have this image, you would have no idea what's going on in here. Not that we have a whole lot of idea anyway, but this show, this is what Hubble sees, what Sophia sees. Case closed as far as I'm concerned, as far as Sophia being worth the investment for the knowledge that it's bringing us about these phenomena. I think I'm running out of time. So I might, you know, I'll offer these slides to Brian to send out to anybody who wants them. I hope that's OK, Brian. Yeah, we'd like to be able to post these onto the Outreach Resource page for this on the NSN website. I do want to note that we do have, you might remember Missy Holzer flew with Theresa Moody on Sophia a few years ago. She's on this and I don't know whether she's willing to come on and say hello, but maybe just say, hey, great experience or something. I don't know, Missy, if you're willing, you know, feel free to say hi. Yeah, I tell you, it was unbelievable experience to go up there for a couple different nights a couple years back, and we had the wonderful opportunity doing it with Dana. So we got the expertise of Dana with us, and so it was just an unbelievably fabulous experience. And what's even better now is being trained as an ambassador, is going out and sharing the word about Sophia. And it just brings back such wonderful memories, and I just get so excited. And I get to my Jersey girl speak, and I speak so fast because I just loved it. I just love to share the content of Sophia. So terrific experience. I had a lot of fun, too. I skipped over some stuff. This is M82. There's the supernova. This is the near-infrared image of the supernova. This is near-infrared spectra and wavelengths that most of this spectral range does not reach even Manakea. This is stuff that you couldn't do from even a mountain top on Earth. There's a stretch right here that's doable from the ground, and there's another stretch right here that's doable from the ground. And this is impossible from the ground. This is impossible from the ground. Sorry, yeah, here. So I was on board this flight, and the investigators were taking the spectrum of the supernova and the near-infrared. And this came off, basically came off of the strip charter. That's not what it was. It was a display on the console. And they looked at each other. They said, what is that? They had no idea. No idea what we were looking at. Are those emission lines, or are those deep absorption lines between a continuum? Didn't know. Well, the paper's been published since, and what those are are cobalt and nickel, highly ionized cobalt and nickel emission lines produced by the supernova explosion. Yeah, cobalt tripled, doubly ionized cobalt, doubly organized cobalt, singly ionized cobalt. Yeah. But then we were doing groundbreaking stuff here because the features, the spectral features, were basically inaccessible from the ground. What you're seeing is the nucleosynthesis, as Andy Fracknoy, our friends, and Davidson, my buddy and colleague at Foothill College, likes to say supernovae make jewelry. That's everything past 26, and the periodic table is produced by a supernova. This is a spectral image of M82 showing the motions of the gas and a carbon, neutral carbon at 157 microns. And what the investigators concluded was that they were seeing both the rotation of the M82 galaxy, more or less, edge on, plus a huge galactic wind. You've heard of stellar winds. How about a galactic wind from a star burst? This galaxy is making 100 times, stars in 100 times the rate the Milky Way does for reasons that are maybe not well understood, probably due to the fact that it's being tidally affected by M81 nearby. But anyway, M82 is making 1,000 stars a year, and the Milky Way makes 10 stars a year. And the result is this galactic wind that we're trying to study with this experiment on the Fifi LS imaging spectrometer. What have I got here? So Dana, we are at the top of the hour. That was my last flight. Oh, it was. Well, that was good timing. So do you want to say something about that? Excuse me. Your last slide. No, actually, this was a topic. I had two different slides, and now I wish I'd shown this one. But it's the one about demonstrating that there actually is in fall in one of these protostellar objects. This shows the redshifted versus the system center of that spectral feature. Yeah. Well, I discovered in the chat there that not only did we have Missy, who had flown, but we have Helen Tavoro, who was in cycle two. And so I promoted her. And so she wanted to say hi as well. All these people, you're groupies, Dana. That's wonderful. This is Helen. Hi, Helen. Very nice that you're on. I hope you're doing well. Yes, I am. I just want to say that it was such a great opportunity to go on a flight. And we got a lot of girls interested in science and observatory just because they have a role model or something. And I showed the pictures. And everybody got really excited. And even the teachers who follow us, they brought more kids in the classroom for experiments. But I just have to mention that the best thing that happened to me during the flight was seeing the Aurora Borealis from the stratosphere. That was unforgivable. I still close my eyes and I see that. We go pretty far north sometimes. And we get a wonderful display at the right time. Yes. Well, Dana, if that's the end, why don't you go ahead and stop sharing? Stop sharing. Too much sharing. And we're going to wrap things up here. But I want to say thank you. You're a real trooper to continue through this with not feeling well. And so my hat's off to you to continue to join us even when you were feeling under the weather. But hopefully, you'll get better, better soon. I apologize to everyone for those awful noises. But we got through it. Well, that's all for tonight, everyone. You'll go to find this webinar. And Dana, unfortunately, you're going to be immortalized at the Night Sky Network on our YouTube channel because we post these on there. You'll go to find this webinar along with many others on the Night Sky Network outreach resources section on the website. Each webinars page also features additional resources and activities. And we will post tonight's presentation on our YouTube channel so that you can take a look at it again and look at those slides. And we will get those slides from Dana and get those up on the outreach resource page.


One of the fastest growing high school sports in Minnesota is mountain biking, and in this week's Northwoods Adventure, our Josh Peterson sat down with students and the new head coach of the Trek North mountain bike team. There is a draw to being outside in the elements, and for teenagers, add a sense of competition to the mix, you have one of Minnesota's fastest growing competitive high school sports. The Minnesota High School Cycling League has been inspiring kids to try the sport, and it's catching on. Recently Trek North Junior and Senior High School launched their mountain bike team, holding an assembly to inform the students about the sport, the benefits of mountain biking and what the upcoming season will entail. One goal that I've always had was to start some sort of a youth mountain bike league or youth mountain bike team. I know the benefits that I have reaped from the sport, and I just really wanted to pass that on to kids. For some students, it didn't take much to get them interested and wanting to join the team.  I guess I like biking, and biking is kind of a way for me to spread my wings. Even though the mountain bike competition season won't be until fall, some students are excited and ready to get started. I've actually already started. I busted out my bike, I pumped it up, I've been riding around my area, so I'm actually super duper excited for this. Now beginning later this August, the trail system here at Beltrami County's Mobile Maze will be filled with Trek North students, preparing for their first ever mountain bike competition. Students taking part in the program will not only get the physical fitness benefits of the sport, but a strong education as well. I want kids to become self-sufficient, understand that if something goes wrong on their bike, that it's fixable. Trek North's team will be the furthest North mountain bike team in the country, meaning there will be lots of traveling for competitions. But for the student athletes, that's one of the reasons why they wanted to join the team. A chance to get out and meet new people. I'm just hoping to meet a bunch of new people, I'm hoping to connect with some of my younger peers. But this week's Northwoods Adventure in Bemidji, Josh Peterson, Lakeland News. If you've enjoyed this segment of Lakeland News, please consider making a tax deductible contribution to Lakeland Public Television.