A week or so ago I saw that a series of visible International Space Station (ISS) passes were coming up for our area. While looking at the pass predictions I noticed that one of the ISS passes placed it almost in front of Mars at 9:00 pm local time on the 16th. A quick check…

A favorite activity of visual astronomy is looking for distant galaxies. They are often hard to find and barely visible. “Faint fuzzies” is the term often used when looking at these. Galaxies tend to collect in clusters. A massive cluster is the Virgo-Coma cluster seen in this picture. While this is a relatively small area…

Do you remember the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn last December? That was a pretty cool event to watch. Well, a similar event is only a week away. This time it’s a pairing of Jupiter and Mercury! Since December, Jupiter has been slowly pulling away from Saturn. They’ve both rounded the Sun and are…

When you look up at the night sky, what do you see? Stars of different brightness and color, the Moon and some planets, constellations, and maybe the subtle glow of the Milky Way? As amazing as our eyes are, they aren’t all that sensitive to dim light. The night sky is actually loaded with objects…

On Monday, December 21, 2020 the planets Jupiter and Saturn passed each other in the sky.  They appeared closer together during this conjunction than others in hundreds of years. The planets do move about in the sky, but their motion is slow enough that it’s difficult to visualize it.  So while leading up to the…

Comet Hale-Bopp was the last “great” comet prior to Comet NEOWISE that we saw back in July.  That was over 23 years ago! Of course, photography was still in the film age back then.  This picture was taken with my then-shiny Pentax ME Super 35mm SLR film camera and 200mm telephoto lens. When I was…

In the mountains of New Mexico the temperatures vary quite a bit during the year.  Summer overnight lows are typically in the mid-60s, while winter lows are usually in the mid-teens.  Telescopes expand and shrink with these temperature changes.  It turns out that the telescope mount also changes a little.  The result is that the…

When doing deep sky imaging of objects like nebula and galaxies the Moon’s presence is generally considered to make it a “no-go”.   Moonlight washes out all the object’s faint details.  And, the brighter the Moon the worse its effect.  But avoiding moonlight severely restricts imaging time. A relatively new type of filter, called a dual-band…

Ever wonder how astronomical objects got their name?  Dottie convinced our cat Mars to demonstrate how the Cat’s Paw Nebula got its name.  Of course, now Mars wants me to rename the nebula the “Mars Paw Nebula”! The Cat’s Paw nebula (NGC 6334) is located in the lower part of Scorpio, near the “stinger”, and…