Ok, hello, everybody.
Let me introduce our guest speaker tonight, Tom Fields, president of our Spek Real Time
Spectroscopy. And Tom is there in the middle of our screens in the green shirt.
Hello, Tom. Glad to have you with us.
Tom first developed an interest in astronomy at least twenty five years ago when Shoemaker
Levie Comet crashed into Jupiter.
He had an alibi, though.
He wasn't there just watching you.
It's a good amateur astronomer for good.
Twenty five years and for the last eight years, I think since 2011, that's more than
eight years. Now contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine magazine.
We all know pretty well he has been a guest speaker at Nayaf Northeast Astronomy Forum in
front of ME and Telescope Show and a number of others.
He's been a special guest speaker for probably hundreds of groups like this and
been very involved in education, STEM education, STEM education as well.
So, by the way, before we start, I do want to say that Laurie will mute everybody and
anybody on the phone can hit around six to unmuted later on when we have our question
and answer session. And you can also go to the chat feature on your screen and you can
type in a question there.
So, Tom, I'm sure you're one of the kids who in school, if your teacher said, what's your
favorite color, you probably said the rainbow, right?
Oh, that's good.
I never heard that. That's good.
Take it away. Thank you.
Oh, there it is. Correas is him.
Thanks, Walt, for the introduction.
I appreciate it. And it's nice to have had a chance to hang out with all of you for a
little bit just so I'm not just parachuting in to give a talk.
And I've already complimented most of you who were here earlier about your organization
and the giving and the giving back know it's paying it forwards and backwards that we do.
It's often I don't I don't want to get an opportunity to speak to organizations like
yours very often. And usually there are clubs to standard clubs.
And as Walt said earlier, you go on when he and I were speaking on the phone, you've gone
far beyond that now.
But with clubs, you know, I feel like I need to encourage them a little bit to do outreach
with you all. I just need to step back and applaud and admire.
So thank you for doing all that.
So I'm going to talk realistically, probably 50 minutes or so.
I apologize. I know it's after dinner there, so I'm going to have to keep it a little
lively to keep people awake, especially me.
I've given this talk a lot.
I'd love giving the talk because it's fun to open new doors to people and to share with
them a little bit about what's possible.
So after I talk, I'll be here until you drag me off the stage with one of those crooks.
So I love answering questions.
So let me share my screen here and we will get started.
Let's see.
I need oh, there we go.
There's that show. And I usually forget to start as I'm sort of proud of myself right
now for not having had to do that.
So, you know, how have we managed to discover so much about the universe when
we've we haven't left home?
Right. We're still really localized in terms of where we are and what we can see.
We can see images, two dimensional images of the universe.
And, you know, we can get this three to three dimensional sense when there's an
object in front of the other, like doing an eclipse.
If we wait a while, the time dimension, you can look at the upper right hand corner of
that image. For example, you can see stars going on and off.
These are standard candles that we use to measure distances.
And if you spread the colors out and by the way, this is an image from New York State, my
sister lives on Lake George and she snapped this image last April.
So if we spread the colors out, I can't say that in very many of my talk.
So it's nice to be able to say here when I'm talking to a club in L.A., like my last talk
is like they don't know what Lake George is, the spread colors out.
What kind of English is that?
I was trying to pick up that sentence when we spread the colors that we get
aesthetically. It's beautiful here just to see the colors in these gaps that will be
talking about. It's sort of fun to see where does blue end and the next color.
I'm not even sure what the next color is.
I guess it's green. Where is where is the green and yellow begin there.
Just smooth, beautiful transition colors.
And these gaps reveal something about our star as well as other stars.
And we can identify lots of things now.
Now, again, I've learned not to read bullets, so I'm not going to read them here.
But you're going to see examples of these things that I'm showing you on the right as I
give my talk. I used to have a slide.
The next slide used to be a slide with a lot of bullets.
With my key points, I figured, why just try and describe what I'm going to talk about,
what I'm going to tell them.
And one of them was, for example, this is really inexpensive to do.
And I thought, you know, nobody really was paying attention to that slide.
And so I don't show that slide anymore.
But I still like to call attention during my talk to those same key points I've got.
Try this. I've got this little bell here.
So those will be ding moments when I talk about things that are from that original now
limited slide. And I think one of the things just a ding moment thing I'd like to get out
of the way is, look, most of us, many of us aren't imagers.
In fact, some of us are just armchair astronomers.
And some of the attendees here tonight might be that in spite of that, I think you'll find
this talk, although I'm going to talk about things that we as amateurs can do.
My understanding spectroscopy, we understand so much about the sky, about the things we
read, and we deepen and enrich our experience, and I'll point out that as we go
through the presentation tonight, but it's not necessary.
Another ding moment. That would be an astrophysicist.
Thank goodness. I don't have an undergraduate degree in science.
I don't have a doctoral in astrophysics.
The cool thing is and I'm going to brag about it tonight, I'm going to brag about my
ignorance. I did a little bit earlier on before the meeting.
And that is we don't have to know everything in order to enjoy what we're doing.
And the beauty is, since there's no final exams or quizzes these days in this hobby,
then we can pick and choose what we read about.
We learn just enough to do what we want to do.
And then if something catches our attention, we can dig down deeper.
So a little bit of history here just to get everybody to the same level.
Just real briefly here, Sir Isaac Newton, he's the one who discovered it, said to have
discovered that you could split white light into its component colors.
You can also bounce light off a finely line surface.
And even through the reason I paused there, I was thinking I just if you can't see my
head right now, see what you can do to pop.
I think all of you probably can.
But it's helpful because I'm going to have some visual examples.
And also just seeing me nodding and moving around can help keep you awake.
So you might play a little bit if if you don't see a little window up in the corner
that has my face on it.
So Bunson invented the Bunsen burner to burn a sample, put the light through some optics,
including a prism, and look at the result.
And he was a pyromaniac, burnt everything.
And the great thing is he kept good records and we'll see that a little later.
Everything seemed to have a different spectrum, different set of lines and gaps in
the rainbow. Now, this guy over here on the right, Kirkup, we won't talk about much.
He was a contemporary and a cold researcher, a colleague of Bunson.
And just one thing on this following slide I'd like to show you, and that is especially
if I have things set up properly, which if we go like there we go.
OK, so let's get back to that slide.
My apologies for that rookie mistake.
What I want to show you on this slide here is these areas over here.
There's two different types of spectra you can get.
One is a rainbow that has gaps and the other is more or less a black area that has lines
like these. Now, what you get is something Cookoff talked about and we want to night at.