Jedolby

  Sunspots of February 3, 2026 Okay, hold on a sec. Let me be perfectly clear: The sun is the most dangerous celestial orb in the sky, and I DO NOT want you to think that my title "Fun with the sun" means that you can treat the sun, er, lightly. NEVER look directly at the sun with your eyes, not even for an instant!  You know that guy, Andrew Huberman, who says you should go outside immediately after waking up in the morning and look in the general direction of the sun to reset your sleep cycle? DO NOT FOLLOW THAT ADVICE! Make no mistake. The sun is no toy! And, sure, we have all accidently looked directly at the sun from time to time, giving us black spots in our vision for the next several minutes. Experiencing that once should be enough of a warning for you to NEVER DO THAT AGAIN!  Sunglasses don't protect you, either. Do not be misled. Sunglasses were not designed to let you gaze upward at the sun. Not even during partial solar eclipses. Too much harmful radiation can...

  How many times must I image 3I/ATLAS before I prove that it hasn't changed its course? How many times must NASA release the results of their data on 3I/ATLAS before people believe it's a natural object? Yes, Bob Dylan said it best: "The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind. The answer is blowin' in the wind." The greatest irony of 3I/ATLAS is that it is speeding out of the solar system faster than any known object, yet people refuse to let it go! Everybody wants to believe that it's aliens who might just turn their ship around. The news media keeps teasing us about the possibility that 3I/ATLAS is going to launch its probes at earth. In a previous post, I offered some updates on 3I/ATLAS . My primary goal was to prove wrong the newspaper headline of December 27th announcing that 3I/ATLAS had changed course and was now following an unpredictable path. I've been shooting 3I/ATLAS every night, and it's still landing dead center in my camera's...

Although it's probably considered more of an autumn target, variable star Mira, "The Wonderful," in the constellation Cetus, is an object that veteran backyard astronomers the world over will seek out whenever it's above the horizon. Mira is what's known as a "long-period" variable. It waxes and wanes over a period of about 332 days. And its brightness varies from, at best, 2nd magnitude (like the North Star), to as faint as 9th or 10th magnitude. That means that when it's at maximum brightness, you can see it without any optical aid, but when it's at minimum brightness, you'll need either binoculars or a telescope to see it. In my blinking animated GIF, above, Mira was neither at minimum brightness nor at maximum brightness in the two images. Maximum brightness is expected in February of 2026. And that means I probably should have shot Mira back in October of 2025 to get minimum brightness, and then wait till February to get maximum brightn...

  I saw a headline in the news last week that said, "3I/ATLAS Comet Changes Course Again - NASA Warns of Unpredictable Path." Oh, brother! What does the author of such an article want us to believe? "Changing course" for where, exactly? Are we to believe that it's turning around and coming for earth? And does "Unpredictable Path" mean that the comet will soon be lost, because we won't know where to look for it? I realize that headlines like this are mere click-bait. I shouldn't pay any attention to them at all. But apparently a lot of people are paying attention to them! At least, judging from the comments on these types of incendiary articles and YouTube videos, it appears as though a large number of people believe that aliens are in control of 3I/ATLAS. I hope these commenters are just trolling us. But okay. Let's take the headline at face value. If the comet has truly changed course and is now on an unpredictable path, that means my sky...

  Let me just say right up front that 2025 was a very difficult year for me, personally. It may have been even worse than the year of the COVID-19 pandemic. But I won't go into the details of why 2025 was so horrible for me. This blog is not about my personal life. It's about my life as a backyard astronomer. And ironically, even though 2025 was lousy in many respects personally, it turned out to be my best year of astronomical imaging. In my first blog of 2025, I gave a report of my imaging performance in 2024 . It was pretty good. At least I got as many imaging nights (282) in 2024 as I got in the previous year. And I found 5 supernovae in 2024, which was an improvement upon the 4 that I came across in 2023. But 2024 was my fourth year in a row in which I wasn't able to achieve 300 nights of imaging. It seemed that my current location in Tucson was not as good for astronomy as my old house on the west side. After all, in each of the years from 2017 to 2020 at my former re...

[Reader Challenge: In the text, I've included 7 phrases from George Harrison's When We Was Fab . Can you spot them all? Answers at bottom of page.] Out between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter lies the "planet that should have been." But it never formed, because of Jupiter's powerful and chaotic gravitational influence in the region. Instead of a single planet that ought to exist there, according to the 18th century law of Johann Elert Bode and Johann Daniel Titus (known as the Titius-Bode Law ), there are millions of rocky fragments that are collectively known as the Main Asteroid Belt . On January 1, 1801, Sicilian astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi discovered the first known asteroid (1) Ceres. Since then, astronomers have found more than a million asteroids, numbered in order of discovery. For many years, the naming convention of the asteroids required that they be named after goddesses, since they were considered to be "minor planets." Only the major planets...