10 Minute Astronomy

See for yourself February 24, 2025I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the people who influenced me as an astronomical observer and as an astronomy writer. There are many, but two in particular stand out: Gary Seronik and Stephen James O’Meara. Both of them deserve longer, better writeups about the specific things they’ve done that have inspired me, but in this post I want to focus on a common t…

One hundred columns August 5, 2024The September issue of Sky & Telescope magazine is on newsstands now. On the central spread you’ll find, “Where Secrets Are Kept”, the 100th consecutive installment of my monthly Binocular Highlight column, which I took over from the great Gary Seronik back in June, 2016. (Gary’s back at S&T as Consulting Editor, and he’s always been very encouraging of my writin…

Eclipse 2024 photos and more! April 12, 2024I was fortunate to get to be a speaker on the Discovery Princess on an eclipse cruise to the Mexican Riviera. I’m posting some photos here not only as a quick-and-dirty observing report, but also to make them available to my fellow travelers. Folks: download, post, and print at will! During the eclipse on April 8 I did some pinhole projection. I used a …

Observing report: annular eclipse on October 14, 2023 October 24, 2023I’d been so focused on next year’s total solar eclipse that spring was halfway over before I realized that there was going to an annular eclipse this fall. Not only that, but the path of annularity would slash right through central Utah, where I usually go to hunt for dinosaurs. But by the time I wised up, all of the hotels in …

My observing article in the September 2023 Sky & Telescope August 21, 2023Whew — it’s been a minute! Ironic, then, that this post is probably right on the cusp of being too late. The Sky & Telescope for a given month is on newsstands the month before the cover date, and it usually hits newsstands a week or so before that. So I’d expect the October S&T to appear on newsstands at the end of this mo…

Listen to me yap about the Caldwells for 45 minutes December 4, 2020 Briefly: I wrote an article about the 25th anniversary of the Caldwell Catalog for the December issue of Sky & Telescope, and Frank Timmes of the American Astronomical Society interviewed me about it for the AAS YouTube channel. It was a fun interview and I’m grateful to Frank for his interest and for a fun conversation.

Storing (and transporting) my meteorite collection October 18, 2020I finally got around to organizing my (small) meteorite collection. I don’t have the space for a display cabinet right now, and when the pandemic lifts I’d like to be able to easily transport everything to schools and club outreach events, so I got a couple of HDX storage cases from the toolbox section at Home Depardieu. I think t…

Dr. Phonelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Astronomy Apps October 6, 2020Warning: long, navel-gazey confession inbound. To wit: I used to be a bit of a snot when it came to planetarium apps. When I put together my “Astronomy Wish List for Beginning Stargazers” post back in 2014, I wrote: Yes, you can get a free app for your phone that will show you thousands of celestial objects. …

Observing Report: PVAA at the park, October 4, 2020 October 4, 2020My club, the Pomona Valley Amateur Astronomers (PVAA), is gradually adjusting to the pandemic. From March through June, we didn’t hold any club activities. In July we had our first board meeting since February, virtually of course, and we decided to dip our toes into holding virtual general meetings. We also wanted to give people …

Even before I had decided to get the NexStar 8SE, I knew that if I got a big SCT, I’d want a focal reducer-corrector for it. SCTs and Maks have secondary mirrors, which partially obstruct incoming light. This implies a necessary tradeoff: make the central obstruction small, which results in a long focal ratio–typically f/10 […]

It has been a long, long time since I got a new eyepiece. Three and a half years since I got my Edmund 28mm RKE, and just under five years since I got my Meade 5mm MWA, which was the last “premium” eyepiece I picked up (the 28mm RKE is one of my all-time favorites […]

My first decent moon shot in ages. Handheld iPhone 7, shooting through a Celestron NexStar 8SE and an Orion 32mm Plossl, contrast punched up using curves in SnapSeed.

In the recent post on my new NexStar 8SE, I promised to explain why I was moving quickly trying to get the scope and the mount checked out. It’s because I knew I was bound for darker skies. This is Black Mesa, at the extreme northwestern corner of the Oklahoma panhandle. The mesa is named […]

Allan Dystrup’s Classic Rich Field, and more A few years ago, Cloudy Nights user Allan Dystrup started a thread called “Classic Rich Field“. It’s mostly about OB associations, and the early observations were all done with a Vixen 55mm f/8 scope. Later observations were done with classic refractors of up to 4” aperture, and included […]

Backstory: from NEOWISE to Jupiter to the stars Since I write a monthly column for Sky & Telescope, I can’t ever just quit observing (this is a good thing). But I do go through dry spells where I only observe enough to feed the column. Other times my observing ticks up, usually when something comes […]

I just realized that although I’ve built several AstroMedia kits, I’ve never given them more than a brief mention here and there on the blog. If you’re just here for the link, click here. If you want more info and pix on AstroMedia kits and what it’s like to build them, read on. AstroMedia is […]

Yes, the awesome RFT with the strange design and incredibly long name is still around. Amazon is selling the package for $399 (link), BUT as of right now, Newegg.com has it for just $240 (link). You have to log in to see the price, which I did before making this screenshot. Considering that the tripod […]

This all-sky chart shows the planetary nebulae from the Messier and Caldwell catalogs. Horizon lines are for southern California for the next couple of weeks. I put this together for a little observing feature I’m writing for Nightwatch, the monthly newsletter of the Pomona Valley Amateur Astronomers. I don’t know how well this map will […]

Not a ton to say about this other than that we saw it. London was home from school for Veteran’s Day. It was sunny, warm, and bright, and neither of us fancied spending a ton of time standing in the sun, so we limited ourselves to a few quick peeks rather than continuous observation. About […]

Although you’d never know it from the complete dearth of posting from October, 2018, to last month, I neither died nor gave up stargazing. I even had some pretty cool experiences, I just didn’t summon the energy to blog about them. I’m now going to engage in some retrospective pothole-filling, starting with my 6th and […]