Paul Cézanne's Astronomy Observing Reports

Uranus, the 7th planet from the sun, is actually a naked object under exceptionally good conditions. I’ve always been slightly puzzled that the ancients never noticed it. William Herschel first discovered it in 1781.
So it was only a natural for me to see if I could spot it with binoculars.
I printed out some detailed star [...]

Ask almost any astronomer and they’ll tell you that aperture rules. The bigger the telescope, the better it is. But they also say the best scope is the scope that you use the most. That’s why we see the recent influx of “grab and go” scopes, it is easy to pick up a small scope [...]

There are many amazing things in the sky, some are wonderful challenges, some are just beautiful, and some just take your breath away and make you say, “Oh!”
There is a small list of usual suspects that make you say “Oh” when you first see them. You never forget your first rings of Saturn or the [...]

The forecast was good which was unusual. Aside from two days the previous week where other commitments prevented me from observing (I do have an non-astronomy life you know…), the last time I powered on the telescope was January 4th! That’s one bad thing about Celestron’s refusal to put a battery clock in their hand controllers, you [...]

I’m not a big lunar observer. I’ve got nothing against it, but it hasn’t yet fascinated me. Part of the problem is that there is so much there, but much of it, at first glance, is similar to the part right next to it.
Anyway, I was still testing the Burgess CED1 diagonal, this time on [...]

I’ve always been fascinated by comets. It was back in 1973 when comet Kohoutek made its pass. Since then, I’ve of course enjoyed Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake in the mid 1990s. I can’t remember which one it was, but one of those two I was able to observe while driving home at night, seeing it through [...]

This is a tale of hunting down some data, but more importantly a tale of how amateur astronomers help each other. What a fitting beginning to the International Year of Astronomy.
A few days ago I ran some tests on Bill Burgess’s new CED1, the Contrast Enhanced Diagonal. During that test, I mentioned that one star was visible in the [...]