Archive for the ‘Observing’ Category
Thursday, January 18th, 2024
"The Constellations", a series on the 88 modern day constellations with details on the major stars & deep sky objects, mythology, and history of these wondrous patterns in the night sky.
updated 2-24-24
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Sunday, June 18th, 2023
In part one of this post, I described the basic use of Sky View Cafe for planning your viewing of Venus. I hope you've already had a chance to see our sister planet off in the west after sunset. It's been a lot fun showing people how Venus goes through ...
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Wednesday, May 31st, 2023
Our sister planet Venus has returned in the western sky for Spring 2023 into July 2023. She will be with us for a number of weeks. This post will be the first one to discuss observing Venus this summer but the topic has been a favorite of mine for a ...
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Saturday, March 7th, 2020
As you may have figured out by now, I have been using Sky View Cafe for quite a while. Occasionally, I find something new (or quirky) so I thought I would bring a few things to your attention.
First, I like to set the calendar tab as my default view since ...
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Saturday, February 29th, 2020
One of the interesting aspects of observing our Moon is that many features are only visible during certain times within the full cyclic phasing of the moon. Details come and go depending on the angle of sunlight reflecting off the lunar surface and coming back to Earth. As Galileo noticed ...
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Monday, December 16th, 2019
I'm a tool kinda guy. You know .. Swiss Army knife, a good flashlight, some vice grips, and, of course, a good astronomy app. Web based tools and apps for astronomy and stargazing are really the good stuff. This series is going to delve into various tools I've found on ...
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Monday, April 1st, 2019
Yes, indeed! Apparently! That's how we see a star's brightness form our perspective here on Earth. We use the term "magnitude" to describe the brightness of a star. We call the measurement of the brightness from Earth the "apparent magnitude". The effect of this apparent brightness leads us to the ...
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Sunday, January 6th, 2019
This year starts off nicely with a lunar eclipse on January 20. This is a Sunday night during the MLK 3 day weekend and it will be visible to all of North America. The first stage with the penumbra visible is starting Jan 20 at 10:10PM (22:11) EST and last ...
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Tuesday, September 4th, 2018
Here's another update in the series on using Sky View Cafe (SVC) and some details on the recent upgrade of this tool. Kerry Shetline has released the latest upgrade as of July 2017 with a slightly different look but it replaces the legacy Java version. There have been some refinements ...
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Thursday, November 30th, 2017
In this post, we'll continue the discussion of naked eye targets on our Moon. In the first post, we looked at some of the larger mare that present themselves during the week from new moon to 1st quarter. Let's continue to "follow the terminator" and look for some more challenging ...
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