Gregoria Luna's Astronomy Blog

 I have found three winter open clusters in Auriga and Gemini to show sketches of.

 My 10" Dobsonian (SkyWatcher FlexTube 250P) finally gets its first reasonably dark test.

Though the weather forecast was not very hopeful, I stayed up late so I could peek through sucker-holes in the clouds, intent on feeding my new ten inch telescope some astronomical photons. I was surprised to find that it wasn't too difficult to just lift the whole telescope up and take it outside all at once. What the telescope gains in weight it makes up for with having easy to use handles. I wouldn't carry it up or down stairs or anything, but it will go sideways just fine. Maybe I gained a bit of muscle mass by carrying the DT6 in and out all at once the past month.   The seeing was really bad, the cloud cover was really bad, and the conditions did not provide an opportunity to really test the performance of this telescope, but the one thing I did notice was that it was bright as hell. I've seen the nearly full Moon at the same magnification, and at the same surface brightness, but combining the two concepts together puts a bright disk of energy shining into my eye. Mar...

 "...and they don't have ANY interest in making these replacement characters well developed. It's all abo--" "GREGORY!" My mother hollered, interrupting the video . "Yeah?" I hollered back. "COME HERE!" And so I did, thinking she needed help with her online teaching. Instead, she was at the front door, and a very large package labelled "SkyWatcher" was outside.

AstronomySource and TelescopicWatch, which had been in the process of a merger (being owned by the same company), are being unmerged. So now I have a job again. I wrote two new reviews, and a guide to buying telescopes for kids is coming soon.

First night of decent seeing for a while, so I took my dob out to look at planets. Last night I went out to observe Mars late, but the darn scope wouldn't cool down and the image was horrible . Tonight was pretty good. In addition to doing some planet viewing, I got some exploration done, and it's always a nice night when you get to see something new.

 A few days ago I became aware of comet C/2020 M3 ATLAS, which was passing through Orion. I resolved that I would give it a try with my 6" f/8 Dobsonian some time. The past few days have had excellent transparency, so I've been using most of them to get some observing done. Two days ago I first tried the comet, but couldn't confirm it. Tonight, I went out again, and I'm pretty sure I got it. Despite not intending to make a big deal of it, I stayed out nearly an hour, did some exploration and found some star clusters.