Articles

How Affordable Smart Telescopes Are Changing The Hobby

There are some interesting factors to note, about the new, affordable, smart telescopes; and their huge impact on amateur astronomers. Of course, I’m referring here to The Dwarf 2, and The Seestar S50. These are the two affordable, smart telescopes, which are quite impressive. It’s obvious, how valuable, welcomed, and useful they are to experienced Astrophotographers. As I’ve written before, I believe those who have done (or even tried) conventional Astrophotography, will be the ones who appreciate these telescopes the most!

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Totality in Vermont

n April, 2024 at the age of 64, I made my first attempt to see a total solar eclipse. The April 8, 2024 eclipse shadow passed through northern New Hampshire, a five hour drive from our home in Connecticut.

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EQM35 Pro - getting it working right

The EQM35 Pro is a good grab&go mount to go to your favourite dark site with a measured photographic payload of about 7 kgs. It can track the sky very well but it needs some tweaking to get it work right. Adjusting the engagement between worm and worm gears on both axis as well as releasing a bit the central nuts of both axis are operations of vital importance to get good guiding. It will never perform like an Astrophysics but overall it can be a good mount if you want a lightweight, portable mount to use with scopes up to 6” under dark skies.

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Portable power and distribution on a budget.

Everyone with an imaging setup wants to be able to get to a dark sky location and capture a night or two of stunning images, whether galaxies, nebula, clusters, or our own Milky Way. But no one wants to haul heavy power equipment or pay the outrageous prices for power banks and overpriced power distribution modules. Since I must save money everywhere I can and still get my fix of taking pictures of the night wonders of our universe, to date I have been limited to as far as my extension cord can reach from the nearest power source.

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Why aren’t Celestron C6 focusers as good as their older C’s?

Anyone that has used an older C5, knows that the focusers were….special. The C6’s, while seemingly universally excellent optically, have a fairly stiff and inconsistent focus feel. Having just found myself the coincidental owner of both scopes, I set about to find out why.

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John Dobson - Sidewalk Astronomer, Dobsonian Mount Inventor and Teacher

In the 1990’s we had the privilege to have John Dobson as a short term tutor in astronomy. He came to Dallas, to teach his cosmology class and help a small group of us build telescopes.

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Celestron CGE Pro Equatorial Mount: Replacing The Internal Battery

I’ve been having to reset the time or clock on my Celestron CGE-Pro equatorial mount before observing. I just recently found out from others, there is a CR2025 battery that requires changing from time to time.

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Newtonian Reflections

The Newtonian reflector was what most of us either started with and/or grew up with. But somewhere along the way, it got replaced by sexier SCTs and refractors… and seems to have fallen out of favor, and perhaps for all the wrong reasons.

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Time to Lighten Up

I recently relocated to a new house that happens to be closer to town (Tucson, AZ) because of my age and health. Among other things, this move signaled the need for a smaller scope and mount. After years of multiple telescope designs and exotic mounts, I am now officially an “old guy” with a combination of hardware suitable to last until I become that well known computer geek enjoying what everybody else was doing while munching my pizza in my warm recliner watching YouTubers that were still “doing” and not just “watching”.

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Observations of the binary system V548 Cygni using STELLINA smart telescope

In the last couple of years I used STELLINA (Vaonis) to take pictures of classical deep sky objects with some nice results: Now I have decided that it’s time to start using this fantastic small robot telescope for some scientific purpose. In particular my challenge is to explore the capability to detect faint luminosity variations using photometry. Having as a final goal to observe exoplanet transits, I present this first project consisting in the successful detection of the light curve for the binary stars system V548 Cygni during one eclipse.

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