On May 9th Mercury made a transit across the Sun, meaning it passed between the Sun and the Earth. This only happens about 13 times a century, with the next transit on November 11th, 2019. Typically this takes several hours and we were fortunate to have clear skies for the first few hours. Mercury is… Read More »
I spent a fair amount of time in January learning everything I could about astronomy and building my barn door tracker to try my hand at some basic astrophotography. By mid-February I realized that I wanted a telescope in time for the Messier Marathon in early April. I discovered that amateur astronomers had been building… Read More »
All this spring Jupiter has been high in the night sky, appearing just below the constellation Leo. With it being the largest of the planets in our solar system, it’s a lot of fun to observe through a telescope. It’s great to see the cloud bands and especially the Great Red Spot which is a giant… Read More »
The Messier objects are a list of 110 deep space objects, including galaxies, nebula and star clusters, that can all be seen with small telescopes, binoculars and many even with the naked eye in reasonably dark skies. The majority of the list was created by Charles Messier in Paris in the late 1700’s. The largest,… Read More »
The sky ended up very clear tonight and the temps were still in the mid-30’s so I made my first attempt at taking a widefield photo of the Andromeda galaxy. I set up my homemade barndoor tracker on my deck and tried to align the hinge line with Polaris, but my neighbor’s trees were blocking… Read More »