Paul Cézanne's Astronomy Observing Reports

I read in Astronomy magazine that Ceres was close to us, an easy target. I think they said it was magnitude 7. But part of the challenge of observing Ceres is that it looks just like any other star. So you must observe it multiple times, taking careful notes, sketches, or photographs each time to [...]

I had a good night collect subs for another M42 attempt (not processed yet) and the forecast was clear for the next night so I left the scope up using its Hibernate mode so I wouldn’t have to realign it. I considered waking up at 5AM to try and get some waning crescent photos. Well, [...]

It turns out that once you stop shooting your astrophotography images that your task has only begun! You now get to process the images and it turns out this can be a lot of work and there is a lot to learn.
The first thing I tried was to just take one of the 2 minute [...]

Introduction
I heard about the NexStar 50 Club years ago when I first found Mike Swanson’s excellent NexStar site and them promptly forgot about it. About a week ago he annouced 2 new members and I had the germ of an idea. I’ve always like the Messier Marathon idea, and if the skies are ever clear [...]

It had been more than a month since I was able to view Comet C/2007 N3 Lulin and I was anxious to see it again, to see how it had brightened, how it had moved across the sky. I knew it was moving faster now, the chart in Sky and Telescope clearly shows that:

You can [...]

If you are really into astrophotography you should just click away. Here I’m documenting my first real forays into astrophotography and the results are pretty awful. I know a lot of stuff I can do and I probably will do some of it. But I have no real desire to dive into that world, I [...]

I’ve been looking for transportation cases for a few weeks now. I want to protect my 6″ Edmunds Scientific reflector as well as my ASGT head.
I bought a Black and Decker toolbox for the ASGT about a year ago but that broke about the third time I used it. It was made of cheap plastic [...]

There was a lot of astronomy over the Thanksgiving weekend. So much so that I’ll not be able to get it all written down. But lets just record the few unusual things that happened.
Before Thanksgiving I set up the 5″ Burgess refractor and the light pollution shield and invited my 14 year old daughter Anastasia [...]

After last night’s test I left the entire scope setup. The forecast was clear for the next two days so I wasn’t worried at all about rain. I put the eyepieces away, took the diagonal off, covered the objective and went to bed, setting the alarm for 5:20AM, which was just went Saturn should be [...]

I just recieved my 30mm TMB Paragon from Burgess Optical and I was anxious to give it a try. I didn’t need to buy it. I’ve been very happy, quite happy, with my Siebert Optical 34mm Observatory, but a poster in the Burgess Yahoo groups said, and I quote:
I’m not going to bore everyone with [...]