An eclipse – and a Hat?

I could have been a Jedi Knight on the evening of May 15, 2022 as my laser pointer cut green swaths though the thick, summer-like evening fog. The day’s thunderstorms finally gave way – just in time…to the soupy evening humidity as the sky eerily opened up a filtered view of the eclipsing moon. Fortunate […]

Equipment update: Nexstar+ controller failure

Details of how I repaired the LCD display on my NexStar+ hand controller.

As the worlds – move?

You probably didn’t need me to tell you this – but our worlds are moving! I was working on some images of Saturn that I collected on September 19th and noticed its rings were in partial shadow, whereas the next most recent image showed no shadow at all. We know that the orbit of Saturn […]

Sometimes you get lucky

Planetary image processing has never been my thing, as I mentioned in a recent blog entry. There are lots of examples of amateur astronomers producing great planetary results all over the web. I like looking at planets but the processing part has always seemed tedious. And in case you haven’t noticed – I’m a Mac […]

2021 Stellafane and a little Planetary Image Processing

I first attended Stellafane in 2019 and had a fine time. Last year was canceled due to Covid, but now it’s back and I was eager to check it out for a second time. Stellafane – It’s the 85th Convention of Amateur Telescope Makers on Breezy Hill in Springfield, Vermont. So after arriving Friday night […]

Annular Eclipse

Overlooking Lake Champlain from a vantage point just south of Plattsburgh, NY., the 2021 annular eclipse reached a maximum obscuration of nearly 78% at 5:38 AM on June 10th. I caught a few shots through persistent high clouds around that time. I took these through my CPC-800 telescope, a Canon T5i, and using an ƒ6.3 […]

2021 Annular Eclipse Preview

I’m not a morning person! Camping out and preparing the night before was the only way I’d be up to catch this sight. Even so, I didn’t get much sleep. Here’s a preview until I recover. Early morning distant clouds added an eerie air to this photo of the annular eclipse as viewed from a […]

Round and round like a whirlpool

Greetings. What’s a blog if there’s no blogging? Moldy bread? Maybe a dying star? No, just a busy blogger’s time warp. Time for a quick update. The pandemic certainly curtailed my stargazing activities for the past year, and then the cold dreary winter set in. Still there were a few glimpses of light. Last summer […]

NEOWISE, Hercules, and the Swan

Ah, another beautiful night for hunting comet NEOWISE. I watched for quite a while as it set in the NW sky, and then took some photos of the Swan nebula and M13 (the Hercules cluster): Turn the swan upside-down to see it.

Stargazers do it in the Adirondacks!

The Keene Valley library summer lecture series has gone virtual this year. I presented my view of stargazing under our beautiful and rare Adirondack dark skies. Some have asked for the slides, which I’m providing here. They contains some images from this website and others, and topics include light pollution and info about my equipment.