Jedolby

While Comet 3I/ATLAS steals all the headlines, a much better-looking comet, officially dubbed "C/2025 K1 (ATLAS)" is quietly passing over us to the north, on its way back toward the far reaches of the solar system. Although K1 ATLAS had remarkably close fly-bys of Venus and Mercury on the inbound portion of its journey around the sun, nobody has accused it of being an alien spacecraft, setting its own course, and trying to collect information about our solar system. Both of these comets have at least one thing in common. They're both called "ATLAS" because they were discovered by the same survey group known as "Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System" (or, ATLAS). A lot of comets, in fact, share that name, because ATLAS has been a very prolific discovery machine! Remember, for instance,  Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS ? That one was co-discovered by China's Purple Mountain Observatory and ATLAS. Incidentally, Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS also had a very...

  What a weird comet, eh? Here's my shot, taken this morning at around 5 o'clock. Close inspection of the image reveals somewhat of a tail pointing upward, and somewhat of another tail pointing downward. Tail and anti-tail? Perhaps. But keep in mind that we're viewing the comet such that its tails may be pointing away from us, regardless of which side of the comet they appear to be on from our perspective.  Of course, the odd shape of Comet 3I/ATLAS is just one more of several alleged anomalies that conspiracy theorists have pointed to in an effort to persuade us that it's not a comet at all, but rather a space probe sent by aliens from a distant star system to gather information about us or to attack us.  Whatever! I don't believe there's anything artificial about 3I/ATLAS. For one thing, it's come a long way and has to have traveled a very long time across the galaxy. It is likely older than our solar system, meaning that if it was launched by aliens, they...

  You may have seen the online hype this month over two comets that are currently gracing our nighttime skies. We backyard astronomers are, of course, enjoying the views of these comets using our binoculars and telescopes, but we also know that they are far from being "Great Comets," much less being worthy of such widespread coverage by the news media. After all, any comet that one can only barely see with a pair of binoculars is not a comet that non-astronomers will appreciate. I, for example, might look at these comets using my 8x42 binoculars, and say, "Nice!" But if I were to hand my binoculars to a neighbor who knows nothing about backyard astronomy, they would do their best to follow my instructions as to where to look, and ultimately say, "I don't see anything," before handing the binoculars back to me. Now, you take, for instance Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS that was in our skies almost exactly one year ago. That was a much better comet than eithe...

Consolmagno.  Consolmagno? Where have I heard that name before? Oh, yeah! That's the Vatican Observatory guy, right?  Right!! Guy Consolmagno, according to Wikipedia, "is an American research astronomer, physicist, religious brother, director of the Vatican Observatory, and President of the Vatican Observatory Foundation." He has quite the pedigree. Wikipedia says that he "attended the University of Detroit Jesuit High School before he obtained his S.B. (1974) and S.M. (1975) degrees at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. (1978) at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, all in planetary science." You can look him up on Wikipedia yourself, but I'll add here that Wikipedia says, "Known as 'The Pope's Astronomer,' he was named by Pope Francis to be the Director of the Vatican Observatory in September 2015." Oh, and one more thing from Wikipedia, "An asteroid was named in his honour by the Inter...

Sometimes when I'm searching for supernovae, my telescope-pointing software reveals an asteroid in the area of my target galaxy. If it's a brighter asteroid, and if there is something appealing about the naming of the asteroid, I'll take a detour from my primary interest and grab some images of the asteroid. Other times, I might come across in my reading a reference to an asteroid that was named after a famous person or place, which makes me want to seek out and get an image of the asteroid to add to my collection. This requires that I do a little homework to determine the best viewing window of the asteroid, which often requires waiting up to a year or more. I typically mark these on my kitchen calendar, so that I'll have a reminder. My image above, of asteroid (1052) Belgica, falls under the category of the latter. As discussed in my post about Terence Dickinson last year, there are thousands of famous persons who have been honored by naming minor planets after them,...

Recently, I watched yet another YouTube amateur astronomer introduce his series of astrophotography "how-to" videos. There is a plethora of such videos on YouTube. They're all well done. I can't complain about the quality of their information or the quality of their productions, but one thing I always gripe about (if only to myself) is their dismissal of visual (regarded as old-fashioned) astronomy.  Astrophotography has gained quite a following since the invention of the digital camera, the auto-guider, and the Go-To telescope. I might also include, since the invention of the "smart telescopes," like the Unistellar, SeeStar, Dwarf, and Celestron's Origin. All of these inventions can be compared to AI tech. They have removed much of the work and, sadly, the human talent and understanding from traditional astrophotography.  The computer is the lowest common denominator to astrophotography in the "smart era." Computer algorithms have invaded all ...

A couple of nights ago, I found a supernova in galaxy NGC 7331, also known as the "Deer Lick Galaxy." It was the final image I took on the night of August 8, 2025. But I didn't notice the supernova. I didn't see any new stars in the vicinity of the galaxy, and I proceeded to shut down my telescope and camera for the night. But as I downloaded the night's worth of images from my imaging laptop (that's attached to my telescope tripod with double-stick tape), I decided to adjust the contrast and brightness of my image of NGC 7331 and see if a supernova might be lurking in the bright nucleus of the galaxy. To my great surprise, there was, indeed, a supernova in hiding! In the old days, when we astrophotographers used emulsion films to take pictures of celestial objects, we routinely overexposed the cores of galaxies in order to reveal their fainter spiral arms. We considered the washout of the galactic core to be an acceptable loss in order to gain views of faint...