The Supermassive Podcast - 5: Exploring Exoplanets

Episode Date: May 21, 2020

The worlds outside our solar system; exoplanets. This month, Izzie Clarke and Dr Becky Smethurst take on listener questions about exoplanets, celebrate 30 years of the Hubble Space Telescope with Robert Massey, and amateur astronomer Steve Brown shares his beginner’s guide to astrophotography.    With special thanks also to Dr Hannah Wakeford from the University of Bristol. Join the Royal Astronomical Society for an online series of talks exploring their collection. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/livestream-overlapping-collections-across-the-atlantic-tickets-105821880092 The Supermassive Podcast is a Boffin Media Production by Izzie Clarke and Richard Hollingham 

Can you just be careful of slamming the door? I'm recording a podcast. I'm missing a fair few things in lockdown. Mini Neptunes or Super Earths. What are they exactly? Toy Story was released in 1994. No exoplanets around stars. Patience is a must. Cups of tea will get you through. Anything that manages to trump Saturn is, to me, the coolest. As technology goes on, we get more and more precise in our readings and of what we can find. Hello, welcome to the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society.

With me, science journalist Izzy Clark and astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst. How are you, Becky? Are you still in your blanket fort from last month? Not quite, no. Since last month I turned 30 and I'm apparently old now that means so my back is killing me. So I'm in more of a pillow fort now because the blanket fort I had to sort of prop it up with my own head and I just, I couldn't stay like that straight sat for so long. Because adults use pillow forts now, everyone does. Well yeah, I don't. How's's your month been I heard you on BBC Radio 1 yeah that was so exciting I am I woke up to my radio alarm one morning to hear Greg James

freaking out about an asteroid making a close pass of earth people probably heard about this this month this one and a half mile asteroid that came within four million miles of earth which is yeah actually not that close it sounds close but it's not it's something like 16 times further away than the moon so um i just texted him telling him it was nothing to worry about and then uh they got me on their newsbeat show to explain it afterwards as well which is awesome because i think we need more science on radio one you know for the younger audience absolutely you've done your public service there well done becky exactly i'm so excited for this month's episode.

Purely because this topic is one of my favourites. We're exploring the planets outside of our solar system, exoplanets. Plus, we're celebrating 30 years of the Hubble Space Telescope and we have a beginner's guide to astrophotography too. Here with us is Robert Massey, the Deputy Director of the Royal Astronomical Society. Robert, are you also in a pillow fort? I'm certainly in a cushion fort surrounded by them

and behind the microphone and behind me following Richard Sage advice. And like you, I have to watch my back a little bit too. So it's remarkably comfortable. I am wandering sitting in my living room with what the neighbours are going to think looking at this recording equipment and a suspiciously large number of wires trailing

around the room. Yeah, I think it's pillow forts all around in that case. So Robert, when was the first exoplanet actually discovered? Well, I haven't appreciated or at least I've forgotten just quite how long ago it was. It was back in 1992. And before that, there had been speculation about whether they would be possible to detect them but back in 1992 two astronomers uh dale frail and alexander volshkin were monitoring a pulsar which is a rotating star that sends out pulses of radiation it's what's left behind after a supernova and so it was the last place given the star had exploded that you'd expect to find planets but out of the debris of that they they found two worlds. And as these planets go around the pulsar, they affect the timing of the star a little bit. So they detected that,

and then they deduced that there were two planets there. And it's held up ever since. They actually found a third one a couple of years later. And of course, the field's been transformed in the last 30 years. And we now have more than 4,000 confirmed planets around other stars. So it went from being a non-field to a really, really big chunk of astronomy over that time and it took about sort of three years after that to find an exoplanet around a normal star as well if you will right everyone always forgets about that 1992 discovery about pulsars because it was sort of like not what we were really looking for yeah well it's the weirdest place isn't it i mean this this star was the the neutron star in the centre of what I read is formed,

but was formed by two white dwarfs colliding, although that's what people think. That's an exotic enough event in its own right. And then to actually imagine that planets would form out of the debris of that, yeah, it was really the last place you'd expect it. I think what you can say is it's certainly not a habitable place because being in the middle of a supernova remnant with stuff coming out of a pulsar

is not a good place for life to emerge. But it's just amazing that that discovery stood the test of time in the way that it has. And we found a few others since, but not a huge number. So it does genuinely seem to be a rare type of system. Yeah, I love that. I just, I mean, like you say,

like the fact that they're not habitable at all, I think is probably why people dismiss them so much. Because I always think about 1995 as the time that exoplanets were first discovered. And I always put it into context in my head that when Toy Story was released in 1994, no exoplanets around stars. By Jurassic Park in 1995, one exoplanet around a normal star. It's like Hubble. I mean, the Hubble telescope more or less matches my career

from its launch through to where i am now and exoplanets are not that different actually the start of my career or when i started my doctorate 1991 that's that's i'm not going to ask again now all my fellow contributors are here but um you know but 30 years on you think wow this field's just basically tracked through and so year after year it's just grown and grown but i love the idea of using films to document like key events becky that's how i've milestone my entire life it'll get to 2020 they'll be like oh the year of the pandemic be like oh yeah all the cinemas were closed and no big films came out yeah pretty much pretty much anyway we'll be hearing from robert later in the show to explore what to spot in the night skies this month. So just to recap, an exoplanet is a planet that orbits a star other than our sun.

We think there are more exoplanets in our universe than there are stars. If every star had its own solar system, imagine how many planets that could exist when you look up at the night sky. imagine how many planets that could exist when you look up at the night sky. So far, scientists have discovered 4,154 exoplanets, and these are just the ones that are fairly close to us. Astronomers expect to find thousands more in coming years. So I spoke with exoplanet expert Dr Hannah Wakeford from the University of Bristol, who explained how researchers like her find them.

What we're able to do to detect these exoplanets around these other stars is we're able to measure the influence they have on the stars themselves. So the first method that was used to try and find these exoplanets actually won the discoverers the Nobel Prize last year, and this was called the radial velocity method, where you're looking at the pull the planet has on its star's light. So as the planet orbits the star, it causes the light to shift, and we're able to make that measurement. And that can tell us the mass, so how heavy a planet is that is orbiting around the star. And another method, the method that has been the most prolific, the one that has found the most number of exoplanets for us,

is something called the transit method, where we actually are able to measure the planet as it passes in front of the star from our point of view. So imagine you're looking at a street lamp, say it's a kilometer away, that's pretty far away, that street lamp, and there is a small fly passing in in front of that that's the kind of measurement we're making for these planets we're being able to see just one percent change

in the amount of light from that star which tells us that there's this planet passing in front of it if we're able to measure the amount of times it passes in front of it so we're able to measure the orbital period so ours is a year it would take us a year to measure the earth passing in front of it so we're able to measure the orbital period so ours is a year it would take us a year to measure the earth passing in front of our sun twice so that's quite a long time we'd have to wait and when we're measuring these planets passing in front of their stars we can actually measure the radius of the planet so the size of it so if we can combine these two methods the radial velocity method and the transit method we can get the mass and the size of the planet and have an idea about, you know, what are these worlds like? Gosh, that's fascinating, because that's a tiny change that you're measuring and then trying to explore even further.

So if that is just a 1% change, as you say, like, what does that actually reveal? And what can you then, you know, explore even further? Because it's not like you can go and visit these exoplanets. They are so far away. They are. They're really far away. Even our closest star is four light years away. That's a really long way to go.

And some of our closest exoplanets are 10 times that, that we can measure in detail. I mean, it's really interesting what we're able to do with these planets and these methods that we're using we can get down to really tiny tiny fractions of light and the thing that i do the thing that i really love doing is actually studying the atmospheres of this planet and the way that we do that is by looking at the light that is filtered through the planet's atmosphere as it's transiting. So as it's passing in front of the star, some of that star's light is passing through the planet's atmosphere, being absorbed, scattered, and emitted by the

planet's atmosphere itself before it then reaches our telescope. So we can actually tell a little bit about what the environment of these worlds is like by measuring that very small amount of light and the way that the planet affects it that is coming from the star. But also another question, the biggest question of all is how did we get here? How is something like the Earth exist? So a lot of scientists are also looking at small planets in their stars, temperate zones, so this region away from the star where liquid water could exist and trying to understand what does habitability mean well that's one thing i wanted to ask you about because when it comes to looking at planets outside of our solar system we always hear about looking for this habitable zone which almost makes makes you think, oh, you know, a carbon copy of the earth,

it's going to be like luscious and green. So what does scientists actually mean when we talk about this habitable zone? Yeah, so the habitable zone is a really interesting concept. And the one that I like the best is this Goldilocks idea. You want to find something that's not too hot and not too cold and just right. And we define that based on the presence of liquid water on a surface. So first off, you have to have a planet that is the right distance away from its star, such that liquid water can exist. So somewhere between a temperature of zero and 100 degrees C. But then also the definition has to have liquid water on a surface. So the

planet itself has to have a surface. So we're talking about a rocky, likely very small world like the Earth, which would have a surface for liquid water to pool on. And that's something that is really difficult to measure. It's difficult for us to confirm. So that's something that people are working on right now. And there's many telescopes in development that should help answer that question. But what we're doing right now is the most important steps towards that. We're learning the different ways we can understand these planets. And we're developing new technology to do things even better than we were before. So pushing through that beautiful scientific method coming through, you do one step and you get better and you do the next step and you get better. And it's a big process. And we're all working towards that big question. I have to ask this, but do you have a favourite system that you're really interested in exploring and researching? I have so many favorite systems. It's absolutely ridiculous. One of my favorite ones that I like talking about is a planet called WASP-12b. We think that it has clouds, which are made of this substance called corundum,

which is the basis of rubies and sapphires. this is a ruby and sapphire world so i love that one just for that pure basis never mind diamonds then ruby and sapphire planets are a girl's best friend right izzy oh my god that was hannah wakeford from the university of bristol i love hannah she's so great if you want to find out even more about exoplanets then she also hosts a podcast called exocast so check that out but listen to that after this one now this is clearly a popular subject so thank you to everyone that sent in their questions on twitter there were tons so becky can you help with some of these natalie dyer on twitter asks i feel like we always hear about earth-like exoplanets what's the most exciting non-earth-like feature of an

exoplanet that you know of ps love the podcast so natalie clearly has good taste that's such a good question yeah it really is i love questions like this because we do get a little bit sort of bogged down in the earth-like things and actually the non-earth-like ones are the coolest yeah so saturn is actually my favorite planet in the solar system so anything that manages to trump Saturn is to me the coolest exoplanet out there so there's this super Saturn called J1407b and it has a ring system that's 640 times bigger than Saturn whoa yeah this is pretty big so if that planet was at the same position like as Saturn in our sky like its rings would be the size of like a constellation for us here on earth so i think that one's pretty cool then there's

things like um kepler 16b that's a planet that orbits two stars so it's kind of like a real life tatooine i think that's awesome like it would be so cool to have two stars in our sky then there's also 55 cancri e catchy name they all have very catchy names these right um but it orbits its star every 18 hours so its year is 18 hours long um and one side is actually tidally locked to the star so like we can only ever see one side of our moon there's the near side and the far side same thing for this planet but it means that one side is always pointing towards its star which is incredibly close to so it's like hellfire raining down on this planet it'll be so so hot god it's so extreme that's amazing yeah but why is it that we are so obsessed with these earth-like exoplanets yeah

from a scientific point of view we can obviously learn more about our own earth from earth-like planets and studying them, you know, how they form, and therefore how we think Earth formed as well, and where they're found around their star, and, you know, those kind of properties. But then there's also, you know, the purely human curiosity perspective, you know, the big philosophical questions of, are we alone? Are we unique in the universe? And I think it's those two things coming together that really drive that desire to really find you know the most earth-like planet or the most earth-like system and Hannah was telling me that the most common exoplanet that researchers find isn't like

anything we have in our own solar system these worlds called mini Neptunes or super earths so what are they exactly? Yeah definitely so we have an abundance of these kind of planets as Hannah said so they're somewhere in the realm of sort of one earth mass up to sort of 17 earth masses which is Neptune's mass and we don't have anything in that range in our solar system we really do have that big leap from sort of earth rocky planet and Venus similar size to up to the gas giants and um the question is whether those kind of planets are more abundant than other planets or not if or if that's just sort of the sweet spot for our methods of finding planets at the minute just like how at the beginning of exoplanet searches you know it was all about hot jupiters

because they were very close their star they were big, and they were really easy to spot and to find. So that's the big question. Are they really the most abundant planet or are we just biased in what we're seeing at the minute? So last year in 2019, people remember it, there was this big discovery of a mini Neptune or a super earth that was in its star's habitable zone. And it had water in the atmosphere as well. And that was the first time that those two things had been found together. And so there was a huge hype about it. Obviously, scientifically, it was dubbed a mini Neptune. People realized that this was, you know,

a gas giant like planet, but with water vapor in the atmosphere, you wouldn't be able to stand on its surface. But obviously the media picked up on it and reported it as Earth-like. So we have to be very careful with whether we report these planets as Earth-like or super Earth or mini Neptune. Because although they fall into this one big category, they're very, very different phenomena. Yeah, get it. Okay. Who else have we got? Aaron B.

So Aaron B asks, if we can perform spectroscopy on an exoplanet, how would we know if there is water and if it's liquid? So spectroscopy is studying the absorption and emission of light and other radiation by matter. Yeah, it's actually very clever how we do this. It blows my mind every time that I think that this is actually possible. So we can actually take the light from the star that the planet is orbiting and just take the tiny bit of light that has passed through the atmosphere of the planet and we can see what wavelengths of light are missing and which ones uh there's extra of so the ones that are missing are the ones where a molecule has absorbed that wavelength of light and the ones that there's extra of is one where

that molecule has emitted that wavelength of light and so when we take the light and split it through a spectrum through a prism get the rainbow this is obviously what we say call performing spectroscopy a very scientific term then we can look at you know all of these bumps and dips to see where the wavelengths are missing and then we know from sort of work in in labs on earth that certain molecules absorb and emit certain wavelengths and also certain molecules whether they're solid, whether liquid or gas, also absorb different wavelengths. So we're looking for a very specific wavelength that's missing when we're looking for water vapor

or even liquid water in a planet as well. It's really interesting though to think about, if we do find water in a planet's atmosphere like this, or we find ozone or oxygen or maybe methane or something like that. You know, the kind of molecules that we associate with human activity and life on Earth. I don't know if it's ever going to be enough to say life exists on this planet. And I think that's really, really interesting because there's so many different processes, just like rocks giving off gases and volcanoes and stuff like that, that can produce similar molecules. You know, we found

water on Mars, for example, you know, in the ice caps and there's not necessarily life there. So it's really interesting that we could find something that looked identical to Earth in its absorption and emission spectroscopy and atmosphere. But would we ever be able to say like for definite that there's life there or life like there is on earth i don't know that is the big mystery as well because these are planets that are so far away we won't be going there it's it's just so fascinating and it's great that as technology goes on we get more and more precise in our readings and of what we can find exactly yeah so recently uh there's just been an exoplanet with iron discovered in its atmosphere for the first time as well i

think it's actually raining iron which is something again goes back to that question earlier about the weird non-earth like things right something that we probably never have even thought to look for because why would it rain iron like it's so interesting right okay so we've got one more question mara paraba asks we have seen diverse populations of exoplanets getting gradually smaller as our techniques got better what progress have we made in understanding what they're made of and their interiors yeah so that's a lot harder of a task than say the atmospheres, which might surprise people a little bit. We tend to go off the composition of the star itself. So we assume that the star and the planets all form from the same gas cloud that will have had some combination of hydrogen and helium and the heavier elements. And so the planets will have formed from

sort of the rubble left over from the star. So it gives us some idea if we can work out, you know, what percentage of the star is metals and what percentage is hydrogen, for example. In terms of their interiors, though, that's obviously very, very difficult. So we have an idea of their density, if we get mass and size from various different planet finding methods. But in terms of like, what actually, therefore the interior is made of is so difficult you know even in our own solar system we're not entirely sure of that only when sort of probes have gone to visit a planet do we know that and from very detailed observations for example like the mars quakes coming from the insight probe on the surface of mars are giving us a better idea of mars's interior but it's really only sort of like earth's interior that we think we know well thanks to you know

earthquakes and everything. So that's a I don't know even if I can say that's a long time coming. I'm never going to say never because I'm sure someone's thinking right now of some clever way of doing this that I haven't thought of. But hopefully that will be something we can probe in the future. Oh, fingers crossed. Well, thanks for clearing those up, Becky. so at the end of april lots of us celebrated the 30th anniversary since the launch of the hubble space telescope hubble has completely transformed how we see the universe but when hubble launched in 1990 we didn't even know for certain that there were planets beyond our own solar system and for as long as we've gazed up at the stars, we've all wondered if there

is life anywhere else in the universe. One way to begin to explore the answer is to determine what is in a planet's atmosphere. So Robert, can we just bring you back in on this? What difference has Hubble made to our understanding of exoplanets? Oh, a huge difference. Simply having a telescope in space really transformed everything. I mean, there are complicated ways to improve the performance of telescopes on Earth, like flexing the mirrors to compensate for the Earth's atmosphere. But the great thing about Hubble is you don't have to do that. You operate this thing robotically in space. It's above the Earth atmosphere. Your data is much cleaner. And it's actually seen a handful of exoplanets in their

own right. I think a couple at last count. And so we've seen a handful of exoplanets in their own rights, I think a couple at the last count. And so we've seen direct images of them with Hubble as well. So an enormous difference. And it'll only get better with a Webb telescope that comes afterwards. But I'd say it's really helped our understanding a great deal. Yeah. So how does Hubble know where to look or what to study? How does that work? There's a competitive scheduling, as you can imagine, when it was launched. Well, actually, after the first couple of years when they had problems with the optics, but certainly very early on after that was fixed, there's been enormous demands on its time. I think something like only 10 to 15% of the observing requests that people make

get allocated because simply people are so keen to use it. So that's decided. Then on the basis of the scientific programs, there were these's decided then on the basis of the scientific programs there were these big goals like understanding the age of the universe that came into it too uh and you know directly relevant to what i studied in my doctorate it found not just planets but the places where planets form around stars these disks of material that we expect planets to to coalesce from and until that time there was still quite a lot of, not just about the existence of exoplanets, but also how they formed, you know, because if the solar system had been unique, for some reason, that would have been a big challenge to astronomy as well. And Hubble helped us answer those questions. So it's clear that, you know, Hubble is incredibly popular,

people want to use it and the data that it's collecting. So who actually gets to do that? Well, mostly professional astronomers, if you're on a research team, you can apply for time on it. And it's a US, a NASA and ESA mission. So Europe has a big involvement too. But astronomers all over the world get time on it. There are certain restrictions, I think, on the way the data is handled and who gets to do all that stuff. But nonetheless, it is pretty open. Even amateur astronomers have had bits of time in the past, although I don't think that's quite applying right now, but certainly in the past they did.

So they've been pretty generous. And I would also say as well, to their credit, that they're very good about releasing images into the public domain. So if you go to the Hubble website, you see all these spectacular images of our solar system. And really, you know, I think every observatory should operate a similar policy.

We should share these beautiful images with the public as much as we can. Yeah. So I currently have an application in to use Hubble right now. So I'm hoping I'm going to be in the 10% that gets accepted. But yeah, I have ticked the box that says, you know, after 12 months, you can make this data completely public. So they will be able to go onto the, you know, the huge Hubble archive and search for the images, you know, that I've requested of me anyway, is what I search for is galaxies. But what I love about Hubble is that, you know, we've had the Kepler Space Telescope, which has been searching for planets for 10 years now. And that's what really found the bulk of these 4000 planets that we know of. But Hubble is really cool because then when you find something that's really interesting with Kepler, you can follow it up in so much greater detail.

And that's where the strength of Hubble really comes in. And you briefly touched on Webb, which is going to follow up from Hubble. So how much time does Hubble have and when is Webb coming and what's that hoping to do? Well, Webb is coming, what, next year is the scheduled launch. And this will be an ambitious project because it's bigger than Hubble. It's actually looking more in the infrared, whereas Hubble is more about the optical. But it's looking into infrared wavelengths beyond the red end of the spectrum. It will travel to a point a million and a half kilometers away from the Earth.

And then the engineers have this, I think, daunting challenge of opening up the mirrors to line them up within a fraction of a millimeter. Because the mirror is six and a half meters across. So it's simply too big to fit into a rocket housing, you have to unfold it in space. And then when that's up and running, it will be doing things like looking for the very first stars and galaxies in the early universe, which I think would be the thing astronomers would look to, as well as studying places like forming solar systems, because in infrared, you can look inside the interior of these clouds and gas and dust where planets and stars form. So it's a great thing to look to. I suspect it'll be delayed a little bit by the pandemic and other engineering challenges, but it should nonetheless be going in the next couple of years or so.

This is the Supermassive podcast from the Royal Astronomical Society with me, astrophysicist Dr Becky Smethurst, and with science journalist Izzy Clark. This month we've been exploring the other worlds outside of our solar system. And if you want to send in any questions to us for a future episode, then email podcast at ras.ac.uk or tweet us at Royal Astro Sock. Now I don't know about you Izzy but I'm missing a fair few things in lockdown right now. One of them just being sat in quiet open spaces surrounded by other quiet people you know there's something really wholesome about it like libraries and museums things like that. Oh yeah I mean I'm definitely missing our monthly rummage through the

RAS archives as well. They are pretty brilliant and the stuff that Sian usually pulls out is just like mind-blowing really. So if you are missing those, like me, the Royal Astronomical Society are taking their archives online. We're pleased to say there's going to be a series of talks from the Society's librarian and friend of the show, Sian Prosser, and they're going to say there's going to be a series of talks from the society's librarian and friend of the show sean prosser and they're going to explore the society's collections and digital archive so if you fancy watching that then we'll post a link to the royal astronomical society's eventbrite page in the episode descriptions they're going on every week for four weeks from may moving on from hobble to home we love taking photos of the night sky and sharing tips. And earlier in the month, the Royal Astronomical Society tweeted asking for

astrophotography advice for beginners. We got such a big response that we wanted to share as much of this advice as possible on the podcast. So here's Steve Brown, Amateur Astronomer and Insights Astronomy Photographer of the Year with his top tips for beginners, starting with equipment. There are various bits of equipment you could use. Most people have a smartphone these days, so believe it or not, you can actually take a fairly good picture with a smartphone. If you just want to take a picture of the stars or constellations or the moon or the brighter planets such as Venus. A lot of phones these days have an astronomy mode so that will put the correct settings for you automatically but you can also use the manual settings on the phone to take as long an exposure as you can.

As long as you hold the phone steady or like lean it against a fence or a wall or something you can actually get fairly decent shots. I love that lean it against a fence yeah okay so that's pretty basic if we want to get a bit more creative what's the next one up from that? Well if you've got access to a telescope you can actually take a shot of things with your phone through the telescope so you just hold the phone up to the eyepiece and if you're observing the moon for example you can actually get really good shots of the moon just on the phone's automatic settings also if you wanted to maybe take your photography to the next level you can buy what's called a dslr camera those have bigger sensors so they can take high quality shots and they have fully manual settings so you can adjust the camera to exactly what you want it to take for any given

situation be it like a Milky Way shot or a shot of the moon and they're really versatile because you can change the lenses so you can have a wide angle lens for a star trail shot or a Milky Way shot or a zoom lens where you can get really close to the moon or some of the smaller constellations. And so let's move on to settings because if we do want to say experiment with a camera there's quite a few other things that I'm learning as I go that you can experiment with and they'll make your pictures better so where should we start with settings on cameras well a lot of the settings might first appear really confusing and very specialist, but they're not really once you get used to them. The first thing to say is the camera should be in manual mode.

You need it in manual focus. With the actual settings of the camera, there's three main settings you need to be aware of. One's the exposure time, another one's the ISO, and the one is the the f-stop or the focal ratio the exposure time it's very simple it's just the the amount of time the shutter is open so an exposure time of one second might be useful for the moon or some of the brighter planets but if you want to capture lots of stars or a nebula or something like that or a galaxy you might need 30 seconds or more even the iso that's basically the sensitivity of the camera's sensor a higher number means it's more sensitive to light the higher the number the

more noise is introduced into the image so with a high iso of maybe 3200 or more you might get a little bit of like graininess in the image so it's important to decide what level of ISO you want and the f-stop or the focal ratio that's just the ratio of the focal length of the lens and it's the ratio of that to the size of the opening and the lens that lets light onto the sensor it's less important than the other two it's more of a thing with daylight photography but with astrophotography you want that number to be as low as possible. So something like f2.8 is quite a good one. Generally, the lower, the better. And do you have any final pearls of wisdom for anyone that wants to give astrophotography a go, but haven't done it quite yet?

Well, there's several things you can do. There's loads of resources online. There's loads of videos people post and forums and things where people are discussing astrophotography so feel free to ask questions and then if you do get something if you do get a dslr or something just get familiar with it and don't be disheartened if you think they're not very good at first just keep practicing and going out when it's clear and just keep going at it because it's a really rewarding hobby and you'll see plenty of pictures online that people

post and look really good and you might think how on earth did they do that but after only a short amount of time if you keep practicing you'll get similar shots so give it a go thanks steve and if you want to see some of these photos you can follow him on twitter and instagram it's at sjb underscore astro plus we'll be sharing some of his photos on the royal astronomical society's social media channels becky anything else to add to that ah not much i guess great advice though from steve there i mean if there's one thing i've learned from astrophotography it's that patience is key hilariously though like professional astronomers like can't do this stuff like mostly because you know when we go to telescopes to use these billion

dollars worth of equipment it's already all been set up by people who really know what they're doing and we just turn up and learn the commands on the computer to make it point at stuff thankfully like you can get similar setups at home so if anyone wants to look into telescopes that you can link to sort of an app on your phone so that you can say on your phone I want to look at this thing and then then the telescope moves to that place. Those are obviously maybe a little bit more of a step up, maybe a birthday or a Christmas present, perhaps. Oh, but the stuff of dreams. Oh, exactly. Yeah. And there's also some really great activities that you can do with like

Raspberry Pis, you know, these amazing sort of little basic computers that you can get where you could do it as an activity to code up your own software to do that to drive your own telescope with a motor um which is really fun that's an eventual dream of mine is to sort of get that set up in like a shed in the garden and just sort of open everything from my uh from my living room and set it going but yeah we'll get there we'll get there one day yeah we will get there we'll get there i think what's great though is to hear about a lot of the crossover between what professional astronomers do and what amateur astronomers do as well so things like lucky imaging where you just you take like 60 photographs and see which one comes out best we do the same in professional astronomy as well so it's really

cool to hear from amateurs about you know all the things they're doing too Robert what about you I always go to you as like how do I use my phone and how do i take photos of the night sky so what else would you add well i i'm such an amateur at this as well actually but i'm getting better at it simply by the virtue of lockdown and trying it all out so i think the the great advice is really to take something like a smartphone which almost all of us have use that just to take images of the sky itself because you can usually capture something like the moon and the brighter planets fairly straightforwardly. If you live somewhere darker, it's actually not very hard at all, even with a handheld smartphone, to take a picture of the brighter stars. And I've been really impressed by the way that they work these days. If you have a telescope, and I have basic

telescopes, I don't have control systems on them at all. So recently, I've been holding phones to eyepieces of my two telescopes was how I took a really nice picture of the crescent Venus earlier this month. And that's me. You know, I'm no expert at this at all. And it did the job. And I thought this is OK. This is decent enough to show people what you can see and actually to give them an idea of what they'll really see when they look through a telescope or hold a pair of binoculars up to the sky. pair of binoculars up to the sky yeah I mean I've certainly been having a go and play around recently because I saw the moon recently and it looks so stunning that I just had binoculars on the side so I grabbed them was able to sort of steady them keep them stable get my phone and balance it and got a photo and I was so pleased with that and then I also recently got a zoom lens so that's a really really recent thing for a camera and I took a photo of the moon and literally

squealed when I could see all of the craters on this pictures it was so exciting but yeah patience patience is a must cups of tea will get you through it's very true I've never met anybody who looked to the moon through a telescope and wasn't excited by it it's a it's an extraordinary thing and let alone taking pictures of craters it's just such a rewarding thing to do. So if we want to put some of that astrophotography advice into practice, what can we see in the sky this month? So we're moving into the summer months now. And so the spring constellations are moving out of view and the winter constellations are long gone. But at sunset, you've got the plough high overhead, the tail of that curving down to two

bright stars Arcturus and Spica which will be really really obvious then and lower down Scorpius and the bright star Antares very much a summer scene but over in the western sky you've got more of this dance of the planets and I've mentioned Venus I think three or four times in previous podcasts simply because it's so obvious well this is its last gasp before it moves between the earth and the sun on the 3rd of june it'll be pretty much precisely between the earth and the sun so it won't be able to see it but in the days before that and i should stress that if you're trying to look at it please do that after the sun sets because you don't want to point a pair of binoculars at the sun it's going to be incredibly bad for your eyes a very bad idea but you should see this really big thin crescent phase, which is a beautiful sight in its own right. And that'll only get bigger over the next few days

towards the end of May and coming out the other side, actually in the morning sky in June. But at the same, in the same time in late May, you've got Mercury coming up as well. Now that's a great thing to see. Not, I think, because it's particularly spectacular. It's just actually seeing it at all. There are astronomers like Copernicus who was reputed never to have seen Mercury during his whole career because he lived in a place where the mists were too bad and he simply couldn't see it. But late May is a good time to try.

You should see it quite close to Venus in the sky. And there's an even better treat on the 24th, which is the crescent moon will join the two planets in the sky. So you have a potentially spectacular... Yay, toenail moon! Toenail moon, a potentially we got some flack for that on twitter and uh and also it's the end of ramadan as well so that's a really nice coincidence of things for any you know any muslim celebrating that could go out and look at that view as well and the ephemeral object the real challenge i think for the end of may the

beginning of june is comet swan, I've been very hesitant about this one because like many comets, they're described as being like cats. So they have tails and they do precisely what they want. And Comet Swan is no exception. So it was getting brighter. It's leveled off a bit. It might be dimming.

It might be brightening a bit more. It might just be possible that it's a naked eye object after sunset in early June. I'm not holding out an enormous amount of hope, but I certainly think that if you have a pair of binoculars, that would be something to spot too. We'll put finder charts and an article on our website to help people look for that as well. Thanks, Robert. Well, that's it for this month. We'll be back next month chatting about life in the universe and the search for extraterrestrials. Yeah, I'm excited about that one. And tweet us if

you try some astronomy or some astrophotography at home. It's at Royal Astrosoc on Twitter or email your questions to podcast at ras.ac.uk and we'll try and cover them in a future episode. Until then though, happy stargazing.