Episode 240: Trevor Barry – The Outback Astronomer | Custom Rigs, Laminar Airflow & Planetary Capture

Join host Brendan O’Brien on Astrophiz as he travels to Broken Hill, New South Wales, to sit down with world-renowned planetary imager and author Trevor Barry.

Listen: https://soundcloud.com/astrophiz/astrophiz-240-trevor-barry-outback-astronomer

Discover how a former mining tradesman designed and built a world-class backyard observatory equipped with a custom 16-inch high-resolution planetary rig. Learn how Broken Hill’s flat outback terrain creates laminar airflow and exceptional seeing, and delve into the engineering behind Trevor’s 32-point mirror cell, Peltier-cooled optics, and high-cadence optical capture protocols. From his early breakthroughs tracking atmospheric storms for NASA’s Cassini mission to winning the ASA Berenice and Arthur Page Medal and ALPO’s Walter H. Haas Award, Trevor reveals the exacting capture, derotation, and processing workflows driving his scientific-grade data on Jupiter and Saturn.

Listen on your fav podcast app or platform, or read the full transcript for an insider’s look at high-resolution planetary imaging, observing nights on the twin 10-meter Keck telescopes at Mauna Kea, and direct research collaborations with NASA JPL legend Dr. Carolyn Porco.

In This Episode: Chapter Index

· Introduction: Arriving in Broken Hill and welcoming Trevor Barry.

· From the Mines to the Night Sky: The “aha” moment that changed everything — a homemade telescope and a first look at Saturn.

· Building the First Telescope: Storm water pipe, backyard concrete pads, and a memorable trip into the rose garden.

· Why Broken Hill Delivers World-Class Seeing: Low humidity, laminar airflow, and near-zero light pollution.

· Inside the Observatory: Building the “ultimate” telescope — custom optics, a 32-point mirror cell, and Peltier-cooled precision.

· First Contact with NASA: Discovering an electrical storm on Saturn and joining Dr Georg Fischer’s Cassini RPWS team.

· From Pretty Pictures to Scientific Data: The strict capture and processing protocols behind data professionals can actually use.

· The Thrill of Discovery: Witnessing Jupiter’s real-time impact scar with Anthony Wesley — and a plaque to prove it.

· A Dream Fulfilled: Two nights observing on the twin Keck telescopes atop Mauna Kea.

· Mission Control at JPL: Meeting Carolyn Porco and sharing a brand-new Saturn storm discovery.

· Advice for Amateurs: Where to send your data and how to build real scientific value from your own backyard.

· Earning Trust in the Professional Community: Generosity, mentorship, and being welcomed by the world’s leading astronomers.

· What Keeps Him Going: Passion, persistence, and managing a punishing observing schedule.

· Looking Ahead: The 2028 total solar eclipse and chasing the fading signal of Saturn’s Great Vortex.

· The Golden Mic: A heartfelt message on sharing the wonder of the night sky with the next generation.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Brendan: Welcome to episode 240 of Astrophiz. I’m Brendan O’Brien and we acknowledge Australia’s first astronomers, the traditional owners and custodians of the land we are on. This episode is produced on Yorta Yorta, Pangarang and Wilyakali country.
Join us as we fight for a greener future as we sit down with the world’s leading space scientists to discover exactly how our universe works.

And right now I’m in remote Outback Australia. Nine and a half hours driving north from Melbourne, six hours east of Adelaide, or 13 hours drive west from Sydney. You choose. We took the nine hour drive and here we are in ‘Silver City’, the mining town of Broken Hill, to meet Australia’s most famous Outback Astronomer, Trevor Barry.

Hey Trevor, how are you?

Trevor: Very good. Thank you, Brendan.

Brendan: Trevor Barry is an amazing planetary observer whose backyard data from Broken Hill, New South Wales, has earned him international recognition within the professional planetary science community. He is also the author of the fabulous book Outback Astronomer, which I highly recommend to anyone fascinated by the reality of independent scientific discovery.

Now, Trevor did not follow a traditional academic path. Instead, he transitioned from a long career in mining to building a world-class independent observatory. And for over two decades now, his rigorous high-cadence tracking of Jupiter and Saturn has provided professional astrophysicists with continuous data that major institutions simply cannot replicate due to limited telescope time.

His meticulous observations of Saturn’s atmospheric storms have directly supported international missions, including NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn, and in 2022 earned him the prestigious Berenice and Arthur Page Medal from the Astronomical Society of Australia, followed up by the 2023 Walter H. Haas Award from ALPO.

Today, Trevor joins us to discuss his book, the technical demands of high-resolution planetary imaging, his personal relationship with NASA, his tour up to Keck, and what it takes to build a bridge between an ambitious backyard setup and the world’s leading space agencies.

Trev, welcome to Astrophiz.

Trevor: Thanks very much, Brendan, for asking me to be on Astrophiz.

Brendan: Excellent, Trev. Now, you have a truly fascinating background, but before we dive headfirst into the night sky, can you share with us that early “aha” moment when your focus shifted forever from the ground beneath your feet up to the planets above?

From the Mines to the Night Sky: An Early “Aha” Moment

Trevor: Well, Brendan, so many serendipitous things have happened in my life that have tended to focus and change my direction. Like most of Earth’s population, I never looked up. I had no interest in the night sky whatsoever. And many years ago, whilst working on the mines as a tradesman, an apprentice came through my department and he and his dad had built a telescope. And he asked me if I’d go and check out his telescope.

Really … I wasn’t that interested in doing so, but he was persistent, and one night I did go to have a look at his telescope. And the first thing he showed me was Saturn. I couldn’t believe that I could see almost a textbook image from this homemade telescope. It was an eight-inch Newtonian reflector on a German Equatorial Mount. That meant nothing to me at the time, but my background was engineering, and from that perspective it was a terrific piece of kit. I was most impressed with what they’d put together, and it’s something that I just had to get into.

That night, instead of being there for a short time, I was there for an extremely long time. And he started pointing out these little patches of fuzz.
They’re there every night, Brendan!! No one sees them. I never saw them. But they resolve into star clusters, emission nebulae, planetary nebulae, all manner of other deep sky objects that I’d never realised existed.
It’s something I had to get into.

Brendan: Fantastic. Now, moving from a career in mining to building your own state-of-the-art backyard observatory in Broken Hill, that’s an incredible leap. But, apart from some issues with your gorgeous and adorable wife’s Jacaranda tree, what were some of the steepest learning curves or unexpected hurdles that you faced when you were setting up your equipment?

Building the First Telescope: Storm Water Pipe, Concrete Pads and a Trip into the Roses

Trevor: Well, initially, Brendan, I visited our local municipal library where I found a book on Newtonian telescopes. And this was what I was going to build — a Newtonian telescope. And it had to be on a GEM, a German Equatorial Mount, because I wanted to track the objects that I was observing, that I would later get into astrophotography with.

What was I going to use for a telescope tube? I worked out what size telescope I wanted to build. I built initially a 10-inch Newtonian reflector, so I needed a tube at least 12 inches in diameter.
What would I use?
I looked around and I ended up sourcing a length of plastic storm water pipe.

So I constructed it on a pier. I welded three fabricated legs, and we had a back lawn
… my wife very much admired her back lawn.
Hahah … I  got the post hole digger out and I sunk three holes into the lawn.

So I had three holes … they were filled with concrete, such that when I put my mount on those three concrete bases, with the centre of each fabricated leg in the middle of the concrete pad, the polar axis was aligned very closely to north-south so that I could track stuff.

The telescope lived in a bedroom in our house. I welded brackets onto the front two legs of the telescope mount and slotted two lawnmower wheels so that I could lift the third leg and wheel the mount like a wheelbarrow … not with a telescope on it.
 And this worked famously until the day happened …  fatal day, when, as I was rolling the telescope mount out from the back veranda onto the gorgeous and adorable’s back lawn … which bordered her rose garden … very proud of her roses …  she can grow anything you know …  the moment came when I lifted the leg I was using to trundle the mount out too high, and Newtonian physics took over and launched me over the top into the rose garden!

Well, the roses weren’t damaged, but I was. And this was the seed planted that I had to have an observatory to house this telescope instead of trundling it out to and fro.

Brendan: Fantastic. Thank you, Trev. Okay, now, Broken Hill is famous for its clear outback skies, but it also presents unique environmental conditions. How do the local climate and atmosphere shape your nightly observing sessions? Do you look forward to winter for better viewing?

Why Broken Hill Delivers World-Class Seeing Conditions

Trevor: Well, funnily enough, young Brendan, not really. Routinely, my best seeing, is March, April, May. That’s the best time of the year for me. That said, I’ve collected good data in every month of the year from time to time.

We’re a long way from the coast, so generally we have low relative humidity. And if you look at the weather charts, as the weather systems cross our continent, west to east, often the high pressure systems track inland and quite often they pass over Broken Hill, over my observatory, which tends to push the jet stream north and south, and I have stable air over the top.

Also, it’s the desert, and the outback of Australia is flat, so there’s no mountains or anything to the west that would delaminate the airflow.

Earth’s atmosphere is layered, and wind shear is bad news — bad news for aircraft, bad news for affecting astronomical seeing. The lower layers of Earth’s atmosphere… the airflow can delaminate — if you’re a sailor, you’d understand this. So we tend to get laminar flow with the low-altitude airflow coming from the west, because there’s nothing, no structures, that can cause the airflow to delaminate. So again, another plus for Broken Hill.

Our community is only small, so light pollution isn’t an issue at all.

The number of times I’ve had professional astronomers come here and they can’t believe that with the light of the new moon in the sky, the Small and Large Magellanic Clouds are absolutely naked eye.     

On a good night out here, you can wander five minutes out of town in nearly any direction, stand on a clay pan and look nearly to the horizon before you can see a star scintillate, before you can see a star twinkle. And not only that, the light of the Milky Way, when it’s overhead, means that your body throws a shadow on the clay pan. It’s just a terrific place to do what I do.

Brendan: Amazing. Look, okay, right now we’re inside your observatory and I’m looking at your workhorse, your rig. Now, for the propeller heads in our audience — and we know we’ve got a lot of them — could you talk us through your current telescope setup here, the optics, and how these amazing images you capture are sent to your computer for high-resolution planetary data?

Inside the Observatory: Building the “Ultimate” Telescope

Trevor: Well, the telescope that you’re looking at, I designed and built specifically for high-resolution imaging of the planets. Preceding this telescope, when I went from the 10-inch scope I first built — I only had a single-storey observatory, but big is always better, so I went two-storey and wanted a bigger telescope, a bigger primary mirror. I sourced that by buying a 16-inch Meade Dobsonian telescope. I didn’t want a Dobsonian telescope; I just wanted a big mirror.

There were major problems with the Meade for high-res planetary imaging. The primary mirror cell was just made of particle board, and it only had a three-point system supporting the primary mirror.

Yay! Rubbish!

So I threw that away and built my own primary mirror cell, that was made of heavy-walled inch-square tubing, welded and fabricated, a 32-point primary mirror cell.

So instead of the primary mirror only being supported in three places, on a big mirror, it was supported in 32 places, so far better support. Back, when I was using the Meade I used their heavy cardboard tube, my ultimate telescope has an aluminium tube, much lighter.

A friend of mine, a very good friend who’s been very supportive since I found him and he found me — Anthony Wesley. In June 2010, Anthony Wesley came for a visit and brought his telescope with him, and set up on the concrete pad where my observatory used to be, in single-storey format. This was a custom-built telescope with an aluminium tube and custom optics — Newport Glass for the primary mirror, Antares Optics for the secondary mirror.

We were both imaging, both checking out what the other was doing, and I was so taken with the difference in quality between the custom-made optics looking at the same target — be it Jupiter, Saturn, whatever — compared with the production optics that came with the Meade. It was then and there that I formed the opinion I would build my ultimate scope with guidance from Anthony on how he went about doing it.

So the scope youre looking at,  the primary mirror was sourced from Newport Glass in California. When you order a primary mirror you specify the curve you’re after — I specified f/4.5.

There’s one master mirror maker in Australia, Mark Suchting, who was then in Sydney, so I placed the order through Mark, and he sourced it from Newport Glass. The thing about their primary mirrors is, unlike mass-produced mirrors on a production line, Newport Glass mirrors stay in an oven for an extended period if time … a couple of months — and the cool-down period lasts over an extended time. They don’t just cast it and take it out of the oven; they let it cool down over time, so there’s no chance of air bubbles forming in the Pyrex from cooling too quickly. So it’s a quality primary mirror.

That came to Mark Suchting, who spent the better part of six months hand-finishing that curve. There’s nothing perfect in this world, but it’s a stunning primary mirror.

Telescope secondary mirrors are flat elliptical mirrors, and the spec for a flat elliptical mirror tends to be around a one-seventh wave tolerance — the difference between the highest peak and the lowest trough on that flat elliptical surface within one-seventh of one wavelength of light. Well, Anthony’s secondary and mine were sourced from Antares Optics, also in California, and they’re one-thirtieth-wave flat elliptical mirrors. All these things go together to provide the possibility of a better result.

Also, as the ambient temperature drops through the night, the temperature of a big Pyrex primary mirror drops but doesn’t catch up — especially critical in the warmer months, especially when imaging before midnight.

So I built a Peltier cooler for my primary mirror. There’s a cold plate, with one side of the Peltier in direct contact with it, and the hot side in direct contact with a heavily finned heat sink. There’s a polycarbonate barrier between the cold and hot sides, three fans blowing air directly into that fin of the heat sink … the hot side …so the air’s then distributed out either end, with a foam barrier around the primary mirror cell can’t feed back of that hot air into the cold side. Three internal fans distribute air from the cold plate onto the back of the primary mirror.

So  run that for two hours in the afternoon before I was going to image that night. Then when I shut it down, I shut the 12-volt power to the Peltiers but leave both sets of fans — internal and external — running for another half hour to equalise the temperature of the cold plate, and it’s another 20 to 30 minutes before I’d image, because I’ve created currents inside the tube.

The tube is aluminium because aluminium mirrors ambient … anyone who parks their car outside, then some mornings you go outside and there’s all condensation on your bonnet.  Steel has gone below dew point and it’s condensed moisture out of the air, and you’ve got condensation on the bonnet of your car …

… a steel telescope tube can actually go below dew point … do the same thing.
The relevant point is …if the tube is at a different temperature to ambient, it generates “tube currents” that run up the inside surface of the telescope tube.

. Using a telescope optically with an eyepiece at 100, 200, 300 power, that’s totally irrelevant. But imaging at 2,000 power, everything between the face of the primary mirror and the object is magnified. So the boundary layer of air in contact with the face of the primary mirror has to be as near as possible to the temperature of the mirror, because if it’s not …  little currents get generated in that boundary layer and I would magnify that! If there were tube currents, I would magnify that! 

All these things we have control over, and everything I can do to make my imaging better, I do.

I’m a pedantic bastard.

Brendan: Heh! And that is Science 101, 201, 301 and into ‘Masters’.

Thank you very much, Trevor. Now, could we reflect on that moment back in February 2008 that led to your first contact with Dr George Fischer and his invitation to support NASA’s Cassini RPWS Radio and Plasma Wave Science team, which began your long-standing involvement with professional research, including with Professor Agustín Sánchez-Lavega?

First Contact with NASA: Discovering an Electrical Storm on Saturn

Trevor: Yes. Well, Brendan, 2008 — I’d finished my degree in March 2005, and by this stage I think Professor Fred Watson and Dr David Malin had visited my observatory. Fred’s been twice. So they knew what I had, my enthusiasm so to speak, and I had professional contacts following the work I’d done at Swinburne in my postgraduate degree.

I was imaging Saturn just with the most basic kit — a Philips ToUcam, just a webcam. And on the 23rd of February 2008, there was this small white spot in the southern hemisphere of Saturn. I hadn’t seen anything like that, and looking at one of my university texts, Universe by Kaufmann and Freedman, I learned that in the previous 200 years there had only been five electrical storms seen on Saturn that were visible from Earth. So I knew what I was looking at was important.

I contacted Fred and David, and David sent me a link to CICLOPS — the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations. Cassini had launched in ’97 and went into orbit at Saturn in 2004, so I knew Cassini was there, and I thought if they don’t know about this storm, they need to know. I trawled the NASA websites looking for any update on something that Cassini had found …and couldn’t find anything, which is why I contacted Fred and David.

So following my contact with CICLOPS, Dr Georg Fischer — he’s an Austrian, then at the University of Iowa — was on the Cassini Radio and Plasma Wave Science team. So the nuts and bolts of that is,  if you have a radio turned on and there’s an electrical storm near you, whenever there’s a bolt of lightning you hear static on your radio.

So that’s all  the data Georg was getting from his instrument on the spacecraft .. the inputs were  whip antennae picking up radio data from the electrostatic discharge lightning within Saturn’s atmosphere.

Georg got back to me and said he knew there was a storm at Saturn, that it had in fact commenced in late November the previous year in 2007.  But up to that point, Cassini had only imaged the storm once — different instrument teams have time allocation on the spacecraft, so Georg couldn’t say “Look, I want Carolyn Porco to image Saturn for me to see wher the storm is”.

The data that Georg got, never even told him what hemisphere the storm was in, only that an electrical storm was happening.

So — to understand this we need to go a bit deeper. There are three cloud layers at Saturn: an upper layer of ammonia ice particles, an intermediate cloud layer of ammonia hydrosulfide ice particles, and a third layer of water ice particles, to a depth of about 300 kilometres. The same three cloud layers exist at Jupiter, but there they’re compressed into a depth of only 50 kilometres — that’s why Jupiter is much more dynamic; it’s a massive object.

These ice particles in the water ice cloud layer have potential energy — they’re just sitting there…. They’re doing not much.

From time to time a poorly understood heat source drives material from below the water ice cloud layer upwards, at about 100 metres a second. As a column of material moves up, the particles rubbing against one another — kinetic energy — building up charge, then discharging. Georg would call that a SEDS — Saturn Electrostatic Discharge — and he’d record the radio signal from the lightning deep within the atmosphere.

Where the amateur data comes into this: that column of material continues to punch upwards and bursts through the upper cloud layer —now  this is different stuff  from deep within the planet — so I imaged as a white spot. Georg told me that at that point, the end of February 2008, he was totally reliant on amateur data, with a small team feeding him data on the white spot where the white spot was, including Marc Delcroix in France, Ralph Vandebergh in the Netherlands, Christopher Go in the Philippines — and would I like to be part of this team?

Would I what!

From that point, whenever his RPWS instrument detected  SEDS, he would drop an email to this group with the challenge being to hunt down the optical counterpart to his radio source. We’d all measure the latitude and L3  longitude of the spot we’d imaged and send it to Georg. Only then could he do his analysis on the propagation of the radio waves through the atmosphere — his field was atmospheric lightning.

At the same time, I was introduced to Professor Agustín Sánchez-Lavega. I didn’t know what other people were doing in Australia …I found an astronomy site, Ice In Space, and noticed this bloke, Anthony Wesley, producing really high-end imagery. He contacted me and we became great friends, and he pointed me to the places I should upload my data — one of which was the PVOL database, the Planetary Virtual Observatory Laboratory. It’s funded by Europlanet, and the servers live in the basement of Professor Sánchez-Lavega’s university.

Agustín is a tenured professor of physics, head of applied physics and head of the Planetary Science Group at the University of the Basque Country in Bilbao, Spain. I’ve become great friends with Agustín, and I’ve now got just under 10,000 data sets uploaded to his PVOL database. He tells me I’m a valued member of his team, and that my Saturn work is fundamental to his research.

Brendan: Amazing. Okay, this is high-quality data, and there’s a massive difference between taking a pretty astrophoto and gathering valid scientific data for professional researchers. What strict parameters or capture protocols do you have to maintain to ensure your data is scientifically useful for the planetary astronomers and academic researchers you collaborate with? What rules do you have to follow?

From Pretty Pictures to Scientific Data: Protocols and Processing

Trevor: Right, many. So, small-scale detail on Saturn is hard to come by. In good seeing there will always be small-scale detail available, but I see so many pretty pictures with Saturn looking beautiful but totally devoid of small-scale detail. I know it’s there — if you get good seeing there’ll be small-scale detail. I suppose what I produce, if it’s been good seeing, could be described as pretty pictures too, but they show the small-scale detail.

Movement in this process is absolutely critical. I will never just take happy snaps — I frame my night exactly what I’m going to do. At the moment I’m only capturing infrared and methane data, because of the things I’m currently tracking —the features that I track that go into my spreadsheets and drift charts, which I’ve done in one instance for over a decade.

So this will vary depending on your camera and telescope, but with my setup I run nine minutes of infrared — so  six times 90 seconds, one after the other, for a total of nine minutes, six and a half thousand frames each at 72 frames a second. Those six images are put into WinJUPOS, derotated and merged to the centre point, time-wise, of the nine minutes — the detail before the centre point moves forward, the detail toward the end moves back.

It’s an amazing software program …  and it’s freeware. Anybody can access WinJUPOS

I do this over at least an hour and a half to three hours, depending on the time of year and how high Saturn is above the horizon for me — I try for a minimum of two hours of data. So I’ll have, say, eight infrared data sets at 20-minute centres, and in between, seven nine-minute methane data sets, processed the same way.

When I first stack my data, I use AutoStakkert, and I have it programmed so the output of each stack opens in RegiStax 6 — a very old program that a lot of people nowadays probably haven’t heard of, but all my computers are old, I’m old, my software’s old, and it works for me.

One of the things RegiStax 6 does is linked wavelet sharpening, and I have several saved routines — seven or eight — for different quality data. Consistency is crucial when you’re producing data of scientific value, so it’ll be the same routine for the whole night.

Once I’ve done my first stack that’s been sent to RegiStax and applied the wavelet sharpening, I save that image before moving to the next stack. One thing RegiStax can do is image zoom So I hit ‘Zoom Image’ — doubling the magnification of the image — and I apply a very heavy wavelet routine that I’ve saved … way overcooked, because in doing so I’ll see if there’s something I initially missed that I can eke out with later processing, because I know it’s there, because I looked, because I took the time to check, so multiple data sets are critical.

Movement is key , so I’m very big on animations. Agustín doesn’t want the images marked up with where I think the detail is; instead I send a detailed report of what’s in my data.

I make two copies of each data run: one goes into a folder I create an animation from. I mark up where the anti-cyclonic vortex — which I’ve tracked since it formed in January 2011, and I’m still tracking it, having just got my first data point AV (anti cyclone vortex)   for 2026 on the 21st of June

So, the images that I use in the animation … I cut just the planet, with a little bit of the rings either side, and paste that above the image going to Agustín, shifted up a set number of pixels above the image of the planet, in the same position in every data set, today, last week, last month, regardless of wavelength. That means professionals can then load,  blink multiple data sets from the same night, or across different wavelengths, and they will  see the marked-up features move, making it easier to identify them in the main image.

It’s just one of the things I do, and I know Agustín loves that I do it — he’s commented numerous times on how meticulous my data is, the trouble and time I go to. After a full three-hour session, it takes me maybe seven or eight days to process that data, and if I have multiple good-seeing nights in between, well, I end up with a massive backlog. But I’m prepared to do it, and I know the professionals appreciate it because they tell me so.

Brendan: This is meticulous science! … Amazing. Thank you, Trev. Let’s just take our propeller hats off for a while and talk about your feelings rather than the technology and the science. What goes through your mind when you’re sitting at the eyepiece, or looking at your screen with the output from your huge telescope, and suddenly you notice a rare dynamic feature — one of the storms, cyclones or vortexes on Saturn — that you found? What goes through your mind when you realise you’re seeing things no other human has seen before?

The Thrill of Discovery: Jupiter’s Impact and a Kindred Soul at NASA

Trevor: Well, if that happens, pure excitement — pure, unadulterated excitement. If I’m doing multiple all-nighters, after three of them, Cheryl, if she talks to me, probably doesn’t get a response — I’m just a zombie. But when I’m down there and good data’s coming in, I’m just alive. And to see something no one else has seen doesn’t happen very often.

On one of Anthony’s trips to Broken Hill with his telescope, we were both set up looking at Jupiter. Now, Shoemaker–Levy 9 was a comet captured by Jupiter’s gravitational field, went into orbit, swung too close and broke into about 21 major pieces, and over seven or eight days they came in …one behind the other — and each fireball like detonating every nuclear weapon on Earth simultaneously, times about five. Incredible to see.  

Rob McNaught — wait, an astronomer from Siding Spring who also visited Broken Hill — gave me the predicted impact times for the first one. That was a thrill, but lots of people were watching because it was predicted.

This particular night, Anthony was visiting and set up where my observatory used to be, and I’m upstairs in the two-storey version. I’d just finished the blue channel of an RGB run and was rotating my filter wheel back to IR — back then the sequence was IR, RGB, IR.

Anthony’s a quiet young fella, I like him, and we get on famously. Well, he let out this holler, and I thought, “ Oh strewth, one of the *redbacks in Cheryl’s garden got him”.

*[Editor’s note: Redback spiders are the Australian murderous counterpart to Black Widow spiders]

But no — he had witnessed, in real time, as it happened, the fireball from an impact on Jupiter. Not a predicted one that every man and his dog was watching for — a once-in-a-lifetime event.

He was trying to get my attention to see whether I’d seen it too.

My filter wheel was in motion when it happened, so I instantly went back to capturing data to see whether I’d get some after-effect, but I didn’t.

I have a plaque in my observatory commemorating that night, because as far as I know he’s the first observer to see a direct impact on another planet in real time, as it happened, not a predicted one.

Brendan: Beautiful. Such a buzz. Okay, look, you had the opportunity to look through a bigger telescope than yours, and they don’t get any bigger than the mighty Keck. Tell us about your trip up to the 10-metre telescopes, 14,000 feet on the Big Island of Hawaii. I think that’s every astronomer’s dream.

A Dream Fulfilled: Two Nights on the Keck Telescopes

Trevor: Oh, what an amazing experience. So, again, 2008 — I got heaps of publicity, internationally and nationally, when I found my first electrical storm. NASA acknowledged it, I got the invitation to be part of the team, and they put out a media release telling the world about this new storm — back then, the greatest storm they’d seen.  
In Australia, The Age from Melbourne sent a photographer and journalist to Broken Hill, The Australian did a full page, and the Sydney Morning Herald did a full page on my work for NASA.

The journalist from The Age, before publication, phoned me with a few questions for a little CV — one of which was, did I have any unfulfilled ambitions? I said I’d love to observe with the twin Kecks — the 10-metre scopes at 14,000 feet on the summit of Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii.

Well, probably, more information … : my university was Swinburne, which has a supercomputer, and Caltech run the Kecks … so Swinburne …   was — I assume still is — the only Australian university with a time allocation on the Kecks, about 20 nights allocated for astrophysics and supercomputing work, in trade for Caltech getting crunch data run on Swinburne’s supercomputer.

My final unit instructor at Swinburne was Professor Duncan Forbes, and after he read the story in The Age he contacted me: “Trev, taking two PhD candidates to Hawaii, we’ve got two nights on Keck 2, would you like to come?”

I had to pay my way, but I got to go to Hawaii with a professional research team, with two nights on Keck. Pretty amazing. All the paperwork I had to sign before we left included waivers for everything I could die from — cerebral oedema and so on — because of the altitude; at 14,000 feet in an aircraft you’d be pressurised. The information said people at the summit of Mauna Kea routinely dose on heavy aspirin to thin their blood to alleviate altitude headaches.

Halfway up the mountain, at 7,000 feet, is the Onizuka Center for International Astronomy and a visitor’s centre. Observatory workers doing multi-day shifts often live in barracks at 7,000 feet rather than going all the way to sea level and back each day.

We stopped there for two hours, where I popped the heaviest aspirin I could get in Broken Hill — I think it was 300 milligrams, and I took two. Then we drove in diesel four-wheel-drives through the cumulus cloud layer — diesel because petrol engines don’t work well that high above 40% of Earth’s atmosphere.

We popped out above the cumulus layer and got out in front of the Kecks. Beside them on the left is Subaru; to the left of that, the James Clerk Maxwell submillimetre radio dish in an observatory that can open. Then Keck 1, Keck 2 — two 10-metre scopes, with a tunnel underneath connecting them with fibre optics so they can be used as an interferometer, synthesising the aperture from the outside of Keck 1 to the outside of Keck 2. Then NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility, Gemini North, the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, and several smaller university-run instruments.

As I got out of the four-wheel drive, standing in front of the two Kecks — the absolute pointy end of optical astronomy on planet Earth — I had tears streaming down my cheeks, thinking of everyone who contributed to that: Kepler, Galileo, everybody who contributed to our knowledge in optical astronomy, to get to that point. I’ll never forget it.

Brendan: Fantastic, Trevor.

This is amazing — let’s talk now back to your research journey. You’ve got all this clean data, your reputation has exploded, and you had a big feature on 60 Minutes, tracking your journey from the mines to the stars. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes because it’s a lovely episode, well worth a watch. During that visit over to NASA’s JPL, you got to meet Dr Carolyn Porco, the legendary “Madame Saturn.” Tell us a little about that journey — walking into the halls of JPL not as a visitor in a tourist centre, but as a direct contributor to that mission.

Mission Control at JPL: Meeting Carolyn Porco

Trevor: Oh, it’s just an amazing thing, Brendan. When we walked into Mission Control — the floor of Mission Control, which was actually operational — the guy in charge at the time came to meet us at the back of the room. He said that many times they’d had Hollywood production companies wanting permission to shoot there, to use it as a prop for some movie, and there’s no way they’d have that.

But he said he was happy to have us there, because of the contribution I’d made to the Cassini mission. That made me feel real good.

Later we sat down, and it was overwhelming to hear Carolyn explaining to Liz the importance of my contribution to the Cassini mission. Incredibly humbling to hear that. We were there in July 2018 — they’d flown the spacecraft into Saturn’s atmosphere in September the previous year, so they had no eyes there anymore.

As an aside, when 60 Minutes was filming in Broken Hill in March 2018, I found a new storm — just a tiny white spot, but in a place I hadn’t seen a storm before, right up on the edge of the north polar hexagon. Really unusual. By the time I flew to Los Angeles in July, it had developed into an amazing structure. I put all that data onto a 32-gig thumb drive to show Carolyn.

Well! We had a NASA media relations gentleman escort us, and we had to remain in line of sight at all times. When the interview was finished and the cameraman was still wandering around taking cutaway shots in Mission Control, this gentleman was never going to let Trev, the mine worker from Broken Hill, stick his thumb drive into any JPL computer.

Brendan: Hahahah

Trevor: So fortunately, our producer saved the day and let me use her laptop.

So Carolyn and I went into another room, and I’m showing her this new storm — she doesn’t know it exists, how it first formed, my first data point, how it evolved over those months. I’m always getting into trouble because I’m very enthusiastic about my subject, and a lot of people really aren’t interested. But Carolyn’s face just lit up — she was as excited as me. That’s a moment I’ll always remember. A kindred soul sort of thing.

Also, outside Mission Control there are three flags — American, Spanish and Australian — representing NASA’s Deep Space Network: Goldstone in California, Madrid, and Canberra,  Tidbinbilla. Whilst in Mission Control, like a kid in a lolly shop, I got to sit in the Cassini mission operator’s chair still at that monitor … There was a display down the front of the control room and it had three radio telescopes representing the Deep Space Network network, and the prime receiving station of NASA’s Deep Space Network was the Australian one — Canberra. How cool is that?

Brendan: Beautiful. Thank you. That will be going straight to the pool room. Now, you’ve clearly proven that amateur astronomers can provide continuous high-cadence tracking that large professional research observatories simply don’t have the telescope time for. What advice would you give to dedicated amateur observers with their backyard high quality rigs, , now that such powerful instrumentation is readily available and somewhat affordable, so that they can feel they can contribute to the science community?

Advice for Amateurs: Where to Send Your Data

Trevor: Well, I’d say one of the first things is, if you’re in Australia, check out Ice In Space, Australia’s amateur astronomy forum — have a look around, see what people are doing. Send your data to places like ALPO Japan, ALPO in the US, the BAA in England. My Saturn data goes to Mike Foulkes, director of the BAA Saturn section, and John Rogers, director of the BAA Jupiter section. Anybody can access the PVOL database too.

I must say there’s now a message on the PVOL site that under no circumstances will they accept data that’s been processed in any way with AI-assisted software — it’s got to be real. I don’t have that problem, because all my software is ancient!

If some people  want to produce pretty images, that should be encouraged — I want to encourage people to look at the night sky, and if they get their kicks out of making pretty images ….

Brendan: And take their kids along

Trevor: Exactly! But if you want to go further, you’ve got to walk before you can run. Use software that works for your data and your instrument — don’t try to copy someone else’s settings from a totally different instrument … Work out by trial and error what happens with different processing settings on your own data. Build your own knowledge base — that’s how you learn. Build up your hours in your own backyard, and share and learn from others.

The only other thing I’d add is that when Leigh Fletcher used the VLT in Chile to capture the great storm in January 2011, he wanted amateur visible-light data for comparative purposes. He trawled through the PVOL database and chose my visible-light data, which got officially acknowledged in an ESO media release and in the peer-reviewed journal Science, in a paper that included that image.

Brendan: Beautiful. Okay, now, in the early days of your work, did you encounter any academic scepticism as an independent observer, and how did you go about earning the trust of the global planetary science community?

Earning Trust in the Professional Astronomy Community

Trevor: Interesting question, Brendan. I must say that in every instance, whenever I’ve met a professional astronomer, I’ve never felt they’ve been looking down on me. I’ve been accepted every time. The first time I met Fred Watson, we visited Siding Spring Observatory looking for Rob McNaught, who’d visited me. In the visitor’s area you can climb up and look through a glass wall at the Anglo-Australian Telescope, the big beautiful yellow beast, and there was this tall, balding man walking around on the floor — Fred introduced himself, Professor Fred Watson. Rob wasn’t there, but Fred took it upon himself to give Cheryl and I the full tour of the Anglo-Australian Observatory.

Brendan: That sort of generosity has kept this podcast going for ten years now. The generosity of the astronomy community, both professional and amateur, has been very warm — they just love sharing information, data and friendship with everyone. I’m often overwhelmed by it, and it keeps me going as well Trev..

Okay, that reminds me it takes an enormous amount of patience — you’ve got to be persistent, with lots of late nights, to achieve what you’ve done. What’s a core thing that keeps you going, that helps you sustain this level of independent scientific contribution year after year?

What Keeps Him Going: Passion, Persistence and Managing a Punishing Schedule

Trevor: Oh, just the passion I have for what’s become my chosen subject. You know, I’m old —I’m rising three-quarters of a hundred. It keeps my brain active — no good vegetating.
I have a passion for it, particularly with Saturn, simply because of the challenge — it’s harder to eke out small-scale detail, so you have to work at it, try different things, develop techniques specific to Saturn, which I’ve dedicated most of my life to doing.

Brendan: Okay, they tell us old people have got to get our protein, keep our brains working, and get our sleep. Now, you seem to defy that, Trev — how do you manage your family life, shopping, everything you need to do to get through the week, and how do you manage your sleep when you might have three, four or five consecutive nights with a magnificent sky out there for you to grab data from? How do you manage your sleep so your health doesn’t suffer?

Trevor: Well, routinely I’m in bed by 7 o’clock — this time of year, in winter, after dinner. So I’m banking rest, supposedly — every hour before midnight is worth two after, so they say — for the next bit of clear weather that’s coming, where I’ll suffer for two or three days.

Brendan: So you set the alarm for 2:30?

Trevor: I just wake up! I have other problems — old people get problems, prostate problems. I told my doctor about it — she asked, is this a problem? I said no, I use it to my advantage. I have a big glass of water before bed, and then I’m assured of not oversleeping. Everything works out fine.

Brendan: You’re hilarious, Trevor. Fantastic, that’s brilliant. Okay, now, let’s look ahead a little for the rest of this year and beyond. What big planetary events and observing projects have you got in your calendar? What are you most excited about training your beautiful telescope on next, and is there an event in the world of astronomy or space science that our listeners should really be watching out for?

Looking Ahead: The 2028 Total Solar Eclipse and Chasing the Great Vortex

Trevor: Well, if you live in Australia, on the eastern seaboard, then in 2028 there’s going to be a total eclipse of the sun, with totality lasting minutes. I think people in Sydney will think the end of the world has come when the lights go out in the middle of the day — the path of totality nearly goes over Sydney. Bathurst is a good spot, Bourke’s a good spot. The track comes in over the top end of Western Australia, comes down diagonally across the Northern Territory, through a bit of Queensland, down into the top of New South Wales, exiting over