brainwagon

I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog, but I’m trying to get some projects going. This week marks a rather rare event: the Tuesday (for us in North America) transit of Venus across the front of the sun. According to this transit calculator, the transit will occur between 3:06 and 9:47 (well after sunset). Back […]

Okay, these are the best of the photos that I snapped during yesterdays annular solar eclipse (well, it was really only a partial eclipse here). We had just left the Maker Faire, and were in the parking lot of Oracle on 10 Twin Dolphin Drive in Redwood City, CA. I took out my 4″ Meade […]

Okay, I did wake up for the lunar eclipse this morning. At 5:30 my alarm went off. I pulled on some clothes, wandered out to the front yard, and sure enough, the moon was already being devoured by the Earth’s shadow. I went back inside, and got my old pair of tripod-mounted aircraft spotting binoculars, […]

Yep, there is an upcoming total lunar eclipse this Saturday, on the morning of Dec 10. It will be the last total lunar eclipse visible from San Francisco until April of 2014, so I think I’ll be trying to get up and see if I can view it and take some snapshots. From San Francisco, […]

Tom mentioned that a new supernova had been found in M101, a spiral galaxy in Ursa Major. While I used to be a bit of a telescope maker, and could generally find my way around the sky, I wasn’t one hundred percent certain I knew where to find M101. So, I turned to my copy […]

I’ve seen lots of bashing of Michael Bay and his movies this weekend. Amongst the blogging world, there seems to be almost universal contempt the flashy, soul-less combination of flashy cars and collagen injected supermodels. And yet his latest release Transformers: Dark of the Moon just claimed the all time Independence Day record, amassing 156 […]

Back on June 7, there was a spectacular coronal mass ejection on the sun: Yes, I did mention this event and gave some links to VLF receivers at the time, but I’ve been thinking about this some more. As an astronomy/telescope buff, I have built simple telescopes for looking at the sun, but I haven’t […]

This morning’s massive coronal mass ejection from the Sun got me scrambling around trying to remember details of how amateurs can monitor solar flare activity during the current solar cycle. Mark Spencer, WA8SME, had some articles on building a small monitoring station that detected SIDs, or “sudden ionospheric disturbances”. The basic idea is to create […]

I’ve had a couple of conversations with Tom over the last couple of days, and they were curiously related. He just got back from a trip to Ireland where he visited Newgrange, a prehistoric tomb mound in County Meath. It actually predates the Great Pyramid at Giza, and predates Stonehenge by a thousand years. One […]

Phil Plait dug out these amazing pictures taken by Damian Peach. If you go to your local library and look at astronomy books that were published when I was a kid, you’ll see no pictures like any of this. The combination of both computer algorithms and video hardware has put the ability to take astonishingly […]

On Monday, December 20th, we’ll have an opportunity to view a total lunar eclipse. Huzzah! It’s been quite a while since I’ve had the opportunity to view one. According to this NASA eclipse calculator, the moon should enter the penumbra of the earth at 9:29PM Pacific time, with the partial eclipse beginning at 10:33 and […]

Lots of amateur astronomers use Registax to do what is known as “Lucky Imaging”. The idea is that you record a bunch of video frames, and hope that you capture some moments of good seeing, which you then carefully align and average to remove noise, and then enhance. I was playing around with a sequence […]

Two different amateur astronomers detected an object impacting Jupiter on June 3.   Catch the video: it’s pretty impressive, and shows that amateurs can make interesting observations of our universe.    If you haven’t looked through a telescope lately (or a good one) this video shows the role that atmospheric conditions play.   As you watch carefully, fine […]

Before computers, my first love-affair with geekiness was an interest in telescopes and astronomy. For the past few years, I’ve slacked off considerably in my telescope making activities, but every once in a while I see something that piques my interest. Gary Honis has a fascinating webpage that details several conversions of digital SLR cameras […]

Sweet.