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Prologue: I Saw Saturn and Learned about the Discovery of Neptune · Crew Collective

• 0:05
  Stuart: Let's start here. Since this is a series about outer space, I figured, why not start where most of us see outer space for the first time?
• 0:14
  Beth: This is called the Dobsonian telescope. It is a Newtonian type telescope, meaning that it is it has an eight inch mirror in the back. It has a secondary mirror up front that is tilted to bring the light to an eyepiece off the
• 0:28
  Stuart: I'm at a place called Klein Observatory in Greensboro, North Carolina, and I've latched myself on to an informal class tour of sorts. A college astronomy instructor named Beth was cool with it, and she's manning a telescope. She's just shown us a star some 500 light years away. And as she likes to put it, it's like looking back in time. And now, we're about to look for Alright.
• 0:50
  So if I look into it right now, what am I gonna be looking at?
• 0:53
  Beth: So I am waiting for Saturn right now to clear. Saturn is right over top of this building right here. Do you see the light over top of that building?
• 1:01
  Justin: Yeah.
• 1:02
  Beth: That point of light is Saturn. Unfortunately, when I bend down, I kinda lose it still in the building. I'm just waiting for it to clear.
• 1:13
  Stuart: Pine Observatory is about twenty minutes from where I live. It's nestled on a community college campus next to a lake. I'm there on a clear Friday night, and off into distance, a high school football game is in full swing. We've got our sights set some 793,000,000 miles into space. Since Saturn's taken its sweet time coming into view, Beth, who I should say is a natural born story teller, tells me a story about the discovery of Neptune.
• 1:42
  Beth: It's my favorite. Okay. So the first five planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, we have known since antiquity. We can see those. We can watch them move through the night sky.
• 1:56
  Once we invented telescopes and we were looking through telescopes, we had people that would systematically just, like, scan the night sky and make notes of what they they saw, anything that was out of the ordinary. And one guy, Herschel, was looking through and he found a planet that or he found a star that he thought moved over the through the background stars. Turns out, yes, it had. It was a planet and we named it Uranus.
• 2:24
  Stuart: For context, this was 1781 and that fellow she mentioned was William Herschel, a famous astronomer from England.
• 2:33
  Beth: So once we found Uranus, people started to try and map its orbit. And we know that Jupiter and Saturn are going to affect that orbit. They're gonna tug on that orbit. And but they could account for that. They could do the math.
• 2:52
  They could account for that. But Uranus wasn't behaving correctly. So two different gentlemen, a young mathematician in England named Adams and a professor of astronomy in Paris named Laverrier, both did math. Lots and lots and lots of math. Would you guys like to see Saturn?
• 3:10
  Yeah. Alright. Saturn's in here. Come take a look. They did lots of math to figure out why Uranus' orbit was behaving the way it was.
• 3:25
  They're like, maybe there's something else outside the orbit tugging on it in the other direction, like a planet that we don't know about. So they both did the math. And Adam sent his stuff off to the royal astronomer at the time, but they were very busy. They had questions, and the two weren't really communicating very well. So it got put into a draw.
• 3:47
  Leveries publishes his stuff. He lets he's sending it out into the community and telling people about what he's working on and says, alright. Here we go. And he sends it off to a guy in Germany whose name was Gala and says, look in this particular spot and see if there is something there. He was off by one degree, which is incredible for the math that he was doing.
• 4:17
  He found Neptune within one degree. They saw it after he said, look in this particular spot. And then Britain's is like, oh my gosh. We have that information. And they pull out that information from that drawer that they got from Adams, and they were scanning the area of the two and also found it.
• 4:35
  So Neptune was discovered by mass.
• 4:42
  Stuart: Although, Galileo nearly beat all of them to the punch.
• 4:48
  Beth: In 02/2009, an astronomer was going through Galileo's books, and he found an entry from January 6 from, like, sixteen o eight, where Galileo was mapping the four mains, moons that we still call the Galilean moons of Jupiter. And you can see his planet and his four moons, but there's this other little notation that he has just off to the side. And so we went and took our models, and we can use computers now to go back and to make see how this all lined up at the time. That was Neptune that he was observing off to the side.
• 5:28
  Stuart: So he was it wasn't even the objective.
• 5:30
  Beth: That wasn't what he was actively looking for.
• 5:33
  Stuart: But he found it.
• 5:33
  Beth: He was observing and it was Neptune off to the side there.
• 5:38
  Stuart: Wow. Just just kind of by chance.
• 5:41
  Beth: Which was like two hundred and fifty years before we even started doing the math to figure out that there was a planet out there.
• 5:48
  Stuart: Wow. So he just kinda made note of it and then went about.
• 5:52
  Beth: Well, so that's the funny part. So Galileo liked cryptograms and puzzles, and so he would send out his new information in forms of cryptogram and puzzles. So there might be where he figured out that, yeah, that is a planet, but we don't know because we haven't unraveled all of his anagrams or his puzzles that he would send out to his friends. So we haven't figured that out yet. So we're not sure if he actually realized that was a planet or not.
• 6:19
  Stuart: Wow. Yeah. So he he made he saw he he might have been the first living person ever to observe that.
• 6:26
  Beth: Yes. Wow. Yes. I'm gonna go put this back in.
• 6:31
  Justin: Yeah. Yeah.
• 6:31
  Stuart: So there you have it. That's the story of Neptune's discovery. Something I probably never would have learned if I hadn't gone to an observatory on a whim. Eventually, Saturn finally decided to show up and I got to look at it. Alright.
• 6:46
  So here we go. Alright. Now I'm I'm looking into I'm looking into deep space. Beth, I don't know what I'm looking at here, but I do see something here that that could be Saturn now. I I don't Okay.
• 6:58
  Beth: So it is it might be right here is your focus if you need to change that. Saturn is vertical, meaning that the rings are on the top and bottom of the planet, not sideways like you would normally think.
• 7:12
  Stuart: Yeah. Yeah. Look at it. I think I see it there. Okay.
• 7:21
  That's that's it. That's Saturn?
• 7:22
  Beth: That's it. That's Saturn.
• 7:23
  Stuart: Alright. We've mission accomplished. We saw Saturn. Having looked back in time, observing Saturn with my own eyes, and learning about the discovery of Neptune, I was just about ready to declare my mission a success and pack it up and head home. This was a Friday night after all.
• 7:55
  But, before I left, I met a student named Justin, who peeled away from his friend group to talk to
• 8:00
  Justin: Yeah.
• 8:00
  Stuart: Hey, man. What's what's your name? Yeah. Justin Kundled. You just looked in the the microscope or the telescope there.
• 8:06
  Yeah. Tell me, what what'd you see?
• 8:08
  Justin: Well, saw Saturn. Right? Obviously, Saturn was kind of in a at least from our angle, it was a vertical up and vertically the position. That's where the rings were. So it's pretty cool.
• 8:20
  You can, you know, see a planet just like with your own eye. I know it's, you know, a lot better when they have the
• 8:27
  Beth: your main vision on.
• 8:28
  Justin: When they have the main observatory open, but it's always fun to be able to see it and know that you can just find it if you have a telescope like this.
• 8:35
  Stuart: Yeah. I mean, like find the planet. This is the closest I think most of us will ever actually get to outer Right. Unless unless Bezos lets us go on, like, his spaceship or whatever. Like, we're we're staying put, I think.
• 8:46
  Justin: If he's listening, I'm I'm down for a a Yeah. A free ride.
• 8:50
  Stuart: I don't think we're going to Saturn, though. If
• 8:52
  Beth: No. Telescopes
• 8:53
  Stuart: up there. But, mean, it's it's just kinda wild. Like, you think of all the billions and billions of people who have lived, like, really, most people haven't seen Saturn with their own eyes. Like, I mean, that's Alright. And when I
• 9:04
  Beth: ready to talk
• 9:05
  Justin: to Yeah. And I, you know, I have been lucky in that I have you know, here at this GTCC, I had all three levels of astronomy. So I did, I was here doing the observing, and learning how to work with the telescopes. And so that was, you know, getting to have a hands on experience and seeing things that most people just never never realize. And I, you know, I became across the constellation Cassiopeia and that quickly became one of my favorite constellations with so many things going on.
• 9:35
  They have a cluster, they've got double stars, all that kind of stuff. And knowing that most people are like, I don't know what a double star is or have never seen a cluster, you know, other than kind of in Orion's belt. It's super cool and I always find myself kinda Take
• 9:49
  Beth: a look.
• 9:50
  Justin: Taking a step back and realizing, I'm not that big in relation to this, you know, big universe we're in. I can't think about it too late at night or I will definitely not sleep the rest of the evening.
• 10:02
  Stuart: You'll drive you'll drive yourself crazy. Maybe that's what's always fascinated us about outer space. It's so much bigger than anything we could imagine. Ever since we began looking up to the stars and discovering planets, us humans have made it our missions to know more about the greatest frontier known to mankind. We've told countless stories and devoted serious amounts of time and resources to exploration, which brings us to this series.
• 10:32
  Welcome to Crew Collective, where we tell stories about outer space through other storytellers. Each episode goes behind the scenes of some kind of work about outer space. Over the next few weeks, we'll hear from a photographer, a novelist, a graphic artist, and a couple filmmakers, just to name a few. They come from all over the world, from different backgrounds and genres, and they all have their own unique approach to storytelling. But all of them have one thing in common, a deep and abiding love for outer space.
• 11:05
  Sloane: For this world, that you can kind of tell by the variety of aliens that you actually see in the comic that there clearly a lot going on to sustain these different types of aliens.
• 11:17
  Andy: You know, Earthrise, the Blue Marble, Buzz Aldrin, Man on the Moon. It's the photographs that I think we we naturally turn to, and they will forever, I think, document and symbolize what is a pivotal moment in human evolution.
• 11:31
  Temi: I have these characters who are 18, 19, and they've been picked for this mission which will take twenty three years to colonize an Earth like planet. They'll be the first no one's ever seen, like, foot there before. And it starts on their last day on Earth where they're thinking, what am I gonna miss? All
• 11:50
  Beth: of the constellations in the night sky have a story and how they got there. So I tell those. I even encourage people to make up their own stories, make their own constellation, and come up with their own ideas. But then as you can hear, I tell stories about how the star moves through its lifespan, and give them information about basic astronomy without getting too in-depth.
• 12:18
  Stuart: So come along with me on this journey. You'll hear from great creators and hopefully, learn about some new stuff along the way. My name is Stuart Barefoot, and welcome to Crew Collective, a podcast from Rocket Genius.
• 12:37
  Matt: Crew Collective is brought to you by Rocketgenius, makers of Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms was the first premium WordPress contact form plugin launched in the space over fifteen years ago. Since then, brands like NASA, Delta, and Stanford University have relied on Gravity Forms for their WordPress form data, but so have tens of thousands of freelancers, agencies, and small creators powering payment forms to newsletter sign ups. For small and large alike, Gravity Forms understands their mission. Build amazing software that people trust.
• 13:10
  Learn more at gravity.com. And we trust you enjoy Crew Collective as much as the team at Rocket Genius did making it.