Jedolby

  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...

  There's nothing more blatantly honest than a graphical representation of data. You may ask, "How did 2024 treat you?" And I may answer, "Pretty good." But how do we quantify what we're talking about? Well, in the first place, if we're quantifying the "goodness of 2024," we need to decide on a subject area. For instance, we could ask about our health, our finances, or our love life in 2024. And in the second place, we need to compare 2024 to previous years, to get a feel for whether 2024 was better or worse than all the others that came before it. Thirdly, we need some way to measure the joy.  Since my blog is about backyard astronomy, it is appropriate for me to ask, on this first day of 2025, "How was 2024, in terms of stargazing opportunities?" Amateur astronomers are not always the best note takers! Some of us may keep meticulous records of our observations, while others of us can't be bothered with the chore of writing thing...