What’s Up for the December Sky

December 2, 2013 admin 0

Key Stars For observers at mid-northern latitudes, the Pleiades star cluster is due south around 10 P.M. local time. Above it is Perseus, flanked by Auriga and Cassiopeia. Orion can be found above the southeastern horizon, and between it and the celestial pole glitters Capella. High in the east are [Read More…]

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Star Party

November 22, 2013 admin2 0

On November 1 Joseph Carro, Tom Frey, Dave Majors (aka Galileo), Gus Nelson, and one parent with an SCT were at Branch Elementary School outside Arroyo Grande.  The school had a very good turnout and we estimated at least 100 people. At one point all 5 telescopes had long lines of at least [Read More…]

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Black Holes, Solar Flares and Jupiter’s Lasers

November 20, 2013 admin 0

On Saturday Oct 5th, 2013 at 10am Aurora Lipper gave an astronomical presentation at the SLO library to the general public entitled “Black Holes, Solar Flares, and Jupiter’s Lasers”. We had over 80 people join us on this bright sunny morning, Dave Majors, Joseph Carro, and Aurora Lipper amazed the [Read More…]

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Annular Eclipse on May 10th

May 13, 2013 admin1 0

Here are a couple of beautiful images from the annular solar eclipse on May 9 / 10th. More info and images are available from NASA and Space.com

Constellation Photography by Lee Coombs

March 1, 2013 admin 0

One of my earliest projects when I first started doing astrophotography was photographing all the Northern Hemisphere constellations. These early photos are still some of my most used photographs whenever I give talks yet were the easiest to take. With today’s modern films, one can record all the stars visible [Read More…]

Photographing the Sun by Lee Coombs

February 1, 2013 admin 0

With an abundance of light, photographing the sun may seem like an extremely easy thing to do. It is this abundance of light, which includes harmful infrared and ultraviolet radiation, that presents the problems associated with solar photography. As kids, many of us experimented with a magnifying glass using it [Read More…]