Finally! After all the bad weather this past week the skies opened up on Friday and I was able to capture a few hours of images of comet 2022 E3 (ZTF). Comets get cumbersome, long names but the media has called it the “green comet” which it is in long exposures. Astrophotography is an involved …
Here we go again – another new comet that “might” brighten to just barely naked eye visibility – maybe. The brightness of comets is notoriously hard to predict since as they near the sun some of their mass will boil away from the intense solar heat. Comets are bundles of ice and rock left over …
Unfortunately the weather and trees made it very difficult to get any good photos last night. This time of year the ecliptic (the path the moon and planets appear to travel) is very low in the south where spring leaves blocked most of the view from Dogstar Observatory. The few photos I did manage to …
If the weather cooperates, head out around 10:30 PM Sunday to see a total lunar eclipse. The total phase begins just before midnight and lasts for over an hour. Check this link for complete details. Photo below is from January 21st, 2019 when it was -4 degrees!
Check out the action in the pre-dawn sky this week as Jupiter, Venus, Mars and Saturn get cozy. A visual conjunction happend fairly often and just means that the planets appear to be close together even though they are millions of miles apart. On May 1st, Jupiter and Venus will be so close as to …
April 22-30 is Dark Sky Week and the International Dark Sky Association is sponsoring a number of events around the world to highlight the damage that light pollution does to our natural environment. As an amateur astronomer, I am keenly aware of the impact that unnecessary outdoor lighting has on observing and photographing the night …
Be sure to check out some new updates to images tab which now includes views from my new all sky camera. You can see the current image and a time lapse of all images taken the night before. We are also waiting on a new weather station so the data is not being updated currently.
Dogstar weather will be down for the next couple of weeks as I wait on a new weather station to be delivered. Hopefully this one will be more accurate on rainfall rates and more reliable overall – stay tuned. I also am replacing the old consumer webcams with Unifi Protect IP cameras which are designed …
I took a quick black & white image of Orion during a very brief interval of clear skies Thursday night. I posted it on Astrobin – a popular site for astrophotographers to share images. You can click here to see it along with annotations that Astrobin provides of all the objects in the image. Orion …
