The Pleiades star cluster is one of the most important objects in the night sky.  Easily identified with the naked eye it has been part of human culture for millennia in various communities across the planet Earth. There is some evidence that it served to mark the line of nodes, later the "first point of Ares" or zero right ascension, many millennia ago. It has certainly been important to mark the seasons and to indicate when it is safe to sail the ocean blue (or the Mediterr

I had a failure of my telescope (the mount) several weeks ago and have not been observing. If I’m going to have a failure like this, the...

I’ve been thinking about imaging the Milky Way with a person in the foreground in some dramatic pose. Well, here it is. Not the...

Image 1: The Green Comet, observed at Lac Teeples on February 12, 2023. This winter there was a lot of buzz about a green comet. At...

Figure 1: The Hercules Globular Cluster (M13) imaged at Lac Teeples on May 22, 2023. I have a fondness for Globular Clusters because...

Figure 1: Milky Way as seen in the northern sky from Lac Teeples on May 14, 2023. This is a wide-field image of the Milky Way. This is...

Image 1: Milky Way from the north shoreline of Lac Teeples looking South, July 14, 2023. This version based on combining/stacking a...

In a number of posts I will be studying the composition of the Milky Way, with the goal of better understanding the sources of the light...

In a number of posts I will be studying the composition of the Milky Way, with the goal of better understanding the sources of the light...

Messier 33 or the Triangulum Galaxy, a galaxy similar to our home Milky Way, composed of stars, gas and dust. In a series of posts I will...

The first image is of Orion tangled up in a tree at Lac Teeples: March 20, 2022. This was shot with a small Canon 24mm camera lens and...

My telescope equipment (iOptron CEM70 mount) has not been working since I returned from my January vacation. Fixing it in the winter has...

In January 2022 I visited the Cayman Islands (in the Caribbean) for two weeks. I tested my equipment on Grand Cayman on an...

The Crab Nebula is the first entry in Charles Messier’s famous catalog of objects that look like comets but are not comets. Messier...

What are those spiral patterns we observe in galaxies and what causes them? Do they represent a stable pattern of differing star/nebula...

M2 or Messier-2 is a "Globular Cluster"... a spherical collection of many stars that are gravitationally bound to each other. Presumably...

And now thing get very scary. Please don’t look at the image until you are well informed and braced for what may come! At Halloween we...

Witches flying on their brooms are not the only thing we expect on Halloween. Perhaps more common are ghosts (or at least children...