Jedolby

Imagine if you wanted to begin searching for supernovae by just shooting random galaxies every night and looking for new stars in your images. How many nights do you think it would take before you'd find a supernova? Or what if you wanted to search for asteroids by shooting galaxies that are in zodiac constellations and waiting to find an asteroid passing nearby to a galaxy? How long would that take to find your first asteroid? Of course, you could get lucky and find either a supernova or an asteroid on your first night of trying. But I was not that lucky! It took me nearly two years to find my first supernova (which had already been discovered several months before I found it). It took longer than two years before I was "fooled" for the first time by an asteroid close to one of my target galaxies. Not long after midnight on January 27th, after 10 years of searching for supernovae, I finally "discovered" an asteroid and a supernova in the same field of view! Wh...

  H27-4, "The Ghost of Jupiter" In the final decades of the 1700's, the German-British astronomer William Herschel and his sister Caroline conducted a survey of the heavens. Together they discovered and produced a list of 2500 star clusters and nebulae that they published in three separate catalogs. Night after night, using a telescope of 18.7 inches in aperture and 20 feet in length, William, making his discoveries at the telescope eyepiece in the garden, called out the positions and descriptions of his celestial objects to his sister through an open window of their house, and she wrote down all the details by candlelight. It was a colossal effort that took them 19 years to complete, and meanwhile, William continued to build telescopes and conduct other scientific experiments in the daylight hours.  You can read all about the Herschels on Wikipedia, so I needn't repeat any more of their story here. However, in modern times, their 2500-object survey still manages to a...

  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...

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 ...

  Supernova in galaxy NGC 2146 I found a supernova in NGC 2146 last night. No, I was not "the discoverer" of the supernova. That would be the Japanese astronomer Koichi Itagaki. He discovered it 5 days earlier. But I didn't know it. I came across it on my own during my nightly search for supernovae in the distant galaxies. Supernova hunting has been my hobby since 2016, and supernova 2024abfl is the 21st supernova I've come across. You can look up supernovae on Wikipedia, so I won't waste your time by describing them here. What I would like to talk about, however, is the sport of supernova hunting.  Supernova hunting falls under the umbrella of backyard astronomy. If you were to purchase a telescope to get a closer look at the stars and planets, there are a number of astronomical activities you might eventually become interested in. Like most people, you'll probably be disappointed in the dull-gray eyepiece views of nebulae and galaxies, after seeing brilliant...