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...

Sunspot group AR4079 In my previous post, I discussed using a HyperStar lens to turn my 11-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope into a Schmidt camera. And while it does a superb job at f/2 imaging, the real beauty of the HyperStar is that it can be removed again, restoring the SCT to its native f/10 focal length for purposes other than fast, wide-field astrophotography. For example, I also enjoy white-light solar viewing and photography with my SCT. Although a large aperture for light-gathering purposes isn't required by the brilliant sun, the large aperture of an 11-inch SCT provides better resolution of fine details of sunspots compared to smaller scopes. I bought the HyperStar and Celestron CPC-1100 from Starizona in 2007. At the time, the HyperStar was the only game in town for fast f/2 shooting through a telescope. Celestron developed their "Fastar" lens in the 1990s, but discontinued them for some reason in the early 2000s. Starizona's HyperStar is similar to the F...

Time is very precious to backyard telescope enthusiasts. Before they shell out their clams on expensive astro-gear, they will likely try to answer one very important question: "How often will I get to use it?" What they're mostly wondering about is how often the weather will cooperate. But other things can interfere with stargazing, like work schedules, family commitments, and health issues, to name a few.  It's difficult to justify spending a lot of money on something that you don't have the time to use. And when you stop and think about it, astronomy, unlike most other hobbies, has some very undesirable aspects that can be motivation killers.  You have to stay up late, for starters. Some people just get tired when they stay up late. But for others, staying up late can be downright uncomfortable. They get headaches and nausea when they stay up late. Another problem with astronomy is that you have to be outdoors, and outdoors at night means that it's probably ...