Charles Messier was a French astronomer who lived from 1730 to 1817. His favorite pastime was searching for comets in the night sky. He was quite successful, discovering a total of 13 comets in his lifetime—an impressive number considering he used only a 4-inch refractor in downtown Paris. While searching in vain for Halley’s Comet, which was expected to appear near the constellation Taurus, Messier came across an object he initially mistook for the comet. However, he soon realized that it did not move against the night sky as a comet would. He had, in fact, re-discovered the Crab Nebula—now […]
Observation Report
9 posts
On 9/18/23 I drove up to Fair Haven State Park near Oswego in order to attempt to see the Aurora activity that night. As the skies looked to be clear I took a chance on the drive, unfortunately when I arrived there were a few too many clouds forming off the lake to really see the Aurora clearly. Still I got the DSLR out to take a time lapse. After a few minutes I noticed a strange phenomenon off to the west that went high over the lake and was not something I had seen before. It was not clouds […]
This weekend I attended the Black Forrest Star Party at Cherry Springs in Pennsylvania. There were over 400 people in attendance. Visitors ranged from fairly new to the hobby, to people with many years of experience and included visual and AP. We had nearly clear skies for both nights of the Star Party. Friday was perfect with not a cloud all night, Saturday wasn’t bad either with only a few high occasional clouds, and the skies stayed clear until about 5:00AM. I was able to look at many targets visually through other people’s Dobsonians, and see details I had never […]
Last night, July 26th, was one of the best transparency nights of the year. Chris, Evan, Rob, Mike F. and I trekked down to DHO for the evening. If I remember correctly, Mike resumed yesterday’s mission to observe the Milky Way, Rob observed Messier objects in the SE sky with his Dob. Evan and Chris imaged the Western Veil, while I slewed around looking for juicy Messier targets. The Milky Way’s dust lanes, Galaxies and nebulae observations and images were much crisper than usual. The Andromeda galaxy and the Comet C/2017 K2 were especially nice tonight. (See below). The cooler […]