I’m planning to go to a rural spot that has a Bortle class 3 night sky around Southern California. Can anyone recommend a beginner friendly telescope with decent magnification for around $200? I’m not interested in using an accompanying smart phone app to go with it either. I’d like to see nebulae and galaxies the most....
Looking like the clouds are finally going to break tonight. The moon’s quickly heading towards the new moon, and we’ve got Virgo rising. I’m excited to get out and check some targets off my list....
I know we did Fridays last time. The weather was bad, so I kinda forgot about it. The transparency tonight is looking suboptimal, and, given my options, I might just settle for hitting some binary stars. My best view is of the eastern sky, and most everything there right now is faint fuzzies, so I don’t have especially high...
Hi, I thought I'd share this here since it isn't being covered by any news sources. It's mostly my own research and calculations, so it could be completely wrong, but I'm fairly confident it's correct....
Does anyone have any experience home brewing a radio telescope? I’d really like to make one myself, both because it seems fun and challenging, and because it would probably be cheaper than buying one of there are any consumer grade radio scopes. I’m aware of some tutorials online, and one concern that I have is that many of...
Hey everyone! I’m putting on stargazing classes in my city with the help of the city parks dept. It involves lugging out 12" dob (we mostly hang out ~120x mag, but I have plans to really juice the magnification if we get small classes and good seeing), some binoculars, and a green laser pointer. I just did the first one last...
Observations with the LOFAR (Low Frequency Array) radio telescope last year showed that first generation Starlink satellites emit unintended radio waves that can hinder astronomical observations. New observations with the LOFAR radio telescope, the biggest radio telescope on Earth observing at low frequencies, have shown that...
I was about 30 years old when I talked to my mother about some program on TV about astronomy when she mentioned that our sun is a star. It's like all the other stars we see during the night, it's just closer to us so it appears bigger. My mind was blown. I didn't understand how I could have lived for 30 years and never thought...