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 [...]

No, I’m not writing about the David Bowie hit, but rather about my telescope’s focuser, but more importantly, about customer support and the person behind the focuser.
The focuser on my Burgess 1278 5″ refractor is pretty awful. I don’t mean that it is not silky smooth or it can’t life a camera or stars don’t [...]

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 [...]

So I decided to shoot the Orion Nebula. Although it is a popular, and beautiful target, it wasn’t one that I initally wanted to shoot. The center is so bright that it makes it difficult to get a good image that both shows details in the nebulosity without blowing out the stars. You solve this [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]