At least according to my simple-minded two-season year it is. As usual my summer turns to bummer after the World Series, changing back to summer when major league spring training begins in February. The timing seems especially auspicious this year as we have jumped from blizzard conditions with a couple feet of snow early this [...]

I’m pretty proud of this one. In a previous post I showed off the grayscale luminance image taken remotely by a LightBuckets observatory in Rodeo, New Mexico on January 3, 2011. To get color, I needed images of the same nebula taken through red, blue, and green filters, and it took me until January 27 [...]

(Click on image to enlarge) According to Wikipedia, The Orion Nebula is one of the most scrutinized and photographed objects in the night sky, and is among the most intensely studied celestial features. The nebula has revealed much about the process of how stars and planetary systems are formed from collapsing clouds of gas and [...]

I say “again” because I have been worrying this poor nebula to death for the past month or so. I promised myself that after I had wrung all I could out of the hours of data I have collected, I would write a little essay about the Crescent Nebula. Maybe this is it and maybe [...]

Gaze at the dark sky and what do you see? Mostly white stars against a black background. A few of the brighter ones show some color, but the human eye is pretty picky when it comes to transmitting color information to our brain. Really dim stuff always comes out bland and gray. The eye needs [...]

This is the Black Eye Galaxy, one of the thousands of deep space galaxies that pepper the universe. It is about 17 million light-years distant, giving us a glimpse into the past of the expanding universe. The dark clouds that give this galaxy its “black eye” are enormous dust clouds associated with star formation, I [...]

I was getting worried that maybe my muse had walked the plank, but he/she has returned with a vengeance. The vernal equinox may have something to do with it. Although my personal “summer” officially ends with the last game of the World Series, the end came early this year, thanks partly to the hapless Redbirds. [...]

I have been renting time on telescopes located near beautiful downtown Rodeo, New Mexico, in the extreme southwest corner of the state. Rodeo is nestled in a mountain valley at an altitude of 4,000 feet in an area known to astronomers for pristine skies with “good seeing.” If you have ever been out on the [...]

What would I do without Astronomy Picture of the Day as inspiration for posts? Dominating the horizon of the bleak Australian landscape below is a sandstone formation called Uluru, fondly (by me) known as Ayers Rock. The picture was taken shortly after sunset, and there is a blue arch rising in the east which is [...]

In a press release dated June 29, 2020, the Gemini Observatory announced the first confirmed planet in orbit around a sun-like star. A planet only about eight times the mass of Jupiter has been confirmed orbiting a Sun-like star at over 300 times farther from the star than the Earth is from our Sun. The [...]