Observing with Street Lights

Observing with Street Lights
Dark sky sites not always necessary to see the Milky Way (This image was taken ouside of a B&B in Julian, CA)

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Answer to Quiz and trying to capture a triple transit of Jupiter

Well, there was a big response for last week's quiz.  I guess most of you passed.  Maybe the quiz was too easy.  Should we have included some astrophysics too?  Anyway, my general comment about the responses is that it seems most of you weren't observing the stars late at night, but instead were watching the late night comedians on TV.  Yeah, just keep your day jobs, if you still have one.

My solar observing yesterday was successful for focusing the eyepiece and we could see a sun spot.  Resident Astronomer Peggy then informed me that there were

Friday, January 23, 2015

Free online cosmology course and photo to quiz your own understanding

This is just a quick and perhaps late reminder to check out the triple moon transit tonight, Friday about 8 PM PST onward, on Jupiter.  This does not happen very often and should be great (unless the Santa Ana's really pick up).

Also having just completed the

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Lick Observatory and photographing geostationary satellites

Yesterday I removed the ham satellite antenna from the mount and put the hydrogen alpha scope  back on.  I had high hopes of seeing the sun, but life events interfered.  It seems the gardeners wanted to use the parking lot for a staging area for raking and blowing and such.  So, after hours of delay, I decided to wait for night and make another attempt at catching some geostationary satellites.  While waiting I got an email from a long time OC Astronomer.  Bob sent a fantastic web list of photos of old and abandoned astronomical observatories.  Thank you Bob.  See the web page post below.  One of the abandoned sites is