Posts

Stargazing During a Full Moon - There is More to See Than You Might Think

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You have finally got a clear night and of course it is the full Moon. What are you going to do? Well, obviously you can observe the Moon directly, but you will have to use a moon filter to do that. If you do not then you are not going to see the fine details.

How to find the Blue Snowball Planetary Nebula (NGC 7662)

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This article examines a spectacular type of object created by a star's final act, a planetary nebula, or more specifically, the Blue Snowball Nebula. Other names that are commonly used for this nebula include NGC 7662, Caldwell 22, and Snowball Nebula.

How to Observe a Dwarf Planet as an Amateur Astronomer - by finding Ceres

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Dwarf planets are largely ignored in amateur astronomy probably because they are not as impressive as some of the beautiful nebulae or galaxies in the night sky.

How to find the M10 and M12 Globular Clusters in Ophiuchus

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This article will cover M10 and M12, two prominent globular clusters in Ophiuchus. The two globular clusters are not only bright, but also only three degrees apart, making them an excellent target on even a full moon night. The best time to view these clusters is during the summer months of May, June and July.

Three Good Reasons to Use an Autoguider in Astrophotography

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On my YouTube Channel I take a lot of astrophotography photos to show you what you can see in the nights sky, unfortunately though they are not always perfect and this is because the mount does not always track accurately and to get around this I have gone and got myself a guide scope. In this article, I would like to list three good reasons why a guide scope would be useful in astrophotography. The first and most obvious reason you would want to get a guide scope is obviously to guide and PHD2 a free open-source software makes and excellent job of this, especially when used with my Astroberry . If you would like to see an example of the PHD2 in action then please watch the episode below. In the episode below I show a side-by-side comparison of the M65 galaxy, comparing tracking and non-tracking images. Although the guided footage is clearly better than the unguided, I would like to point out that both captures have the same exposure and so on, it is just that guided footage i

How to find the Leo Triplet Galaxies (Easiest Galaxy Cluster in the Night Sky)

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In this article, I will cover how to find the Leo Triplet cluster of galaxies and what makes them interesting. There are many great galaxies in the night sky such as the Triangulum galaxy but with a cluster of galaxies you get much more to explore.

How to find the M106 Galaxy in the Canes Venatici Constellation

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In this article I want to show you how to find M106 galaxy and what is great about it, since it comes from an interesting part of the night sky below Ursa Major and above the small Canes Venatici constellation. As there are five Messier galaxies and also a number of smaller galaxies in this region of the night sky.

Optolong LRGB Filter Set Review and Unboxing

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This article is a review of the Optolong LRGB filters . In the beginning, I bought some basic filters to see if my filter wheel would work and how it would work, but later I upgraded to these Optolong filters to improve the photos I was taking.

Find the Northern Pinwheel Galaxy (M101), in Ursa Major and it's hidden surprises

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In this article we are going to discuss how to find the Northern Pinwheel Galaxy, a beautiful galaxy but it also comes with many hidden surprises.

The Likelihood of Mass Extinctions from Space

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There are lots of scary YouTube videos claiming the end of the world could be caused by an astronomical event. But how likely is such an astronomical event to occur? So, let us examine the most common scenarios and order them by most likely to least likely to happen to see if the scary predictions are worth the hype. Number Five - Rogue Black Hole A rogue black hole or stellar black hole is a black hole formed by the gravitational collapse of a star. The black holes have masses ranging from about 5 to several tens of solar masses and a diameter of around 300 kilometres. What makes this type of black hole dangerous is that they can drift through space. These are not theoretical; a rogue black hole was located just 1000 light years away in the Telescopium constellation. If a stellar black hole managed to get into our solar system, it could dislodge objects in the Oort cloud sending them Earthwards in the form of comets. If it got within the orbit of Neptune, it would knock