My 7-year old son Ethan is continually amazing me with his insights, thoughts, and questions. He’s not the most verbal or social of kids, but he is a (young) man of ideas.
Today, entirely unprompted, he came up with the idea of intergenerational starships.
After all, he figured, you can’t get to the nearest stars (he started […]

Hrm … sorry, but I don’t really care what astronomers say. I still think Pluto is a planet.
Some astronomers are still sane:

Although yesterday’s decision was reached by a majority vote, some of the most senior scientists involved are dismayed. “We now have dwarf planets which are in fact not planets. I consider this a linguistic […]

OK, so this is seriously cool: one man basically inventing a new kind of telescope virtually by himself.
One quote I particularly like:

I didn’t want to be influenced by what others had done, so I purposefully didn’t look for other designs until I had come up with one on my own.

How would you like to see Mare Imbrium in high def … just by looking up into the night sky?
You get a telescope in your eye, of course. I want one.
There are some problems, of course. I don’t think the focus or magnifying power is adjustable at this point, and I’m sure your field of […]

I’ve uploaded a couple of my more astronomically-oriented to Space.com’s gallery of amazing images.
I’m not sure that these are incredibly amazing, but they are very definitely mine: here they are.

I hadn’t been keeping up too intensely on matters astronomical the past month or so, so late last week when I went for a night run and saw an unusually bright “star” in an odd location, I assumed it was Venus.
It was intensely bright and yellowish-hued - I could barely help seeing it even during […]

Saw this link to astronomy blogs on my site’s Google Ads.
It’s basically a blogging service like any other (perhaps a bit more amateurish than most) but aimed at astronomy buffs.
Fairly empty so far, but there are a couple of interesting astronomical posts.

The moon, Venus, and Jupiter were in stunning conjunction tonight, so I grabbed the camera, tripod, and binoculars and drove fairly close to the top of the nearest mountain.
That was fairly easy, as I live on Glenn Mountain in Abbotsford, British Columbia.
The conjunction was beautiful but fleeting … it was near the horizon when the […]

There’s a major conjunction just after sunset tonight: Jupiter, Venus, and the moon.
I’ll have to see if I have a good line-of-sight … if I do, I’ll try to take some pictures and see if any work out.

Whoa. Very, very, very cool - a rotating chair that holds your binoculars and tilts back so you can stargaze in comfort.

I saw it first here, and there’s more info at the manufacturer’s site.
From that site:

Comfortable: A reclining chair supports your entire body
Fun: Counterweighted mounting bar holds your choice of binoculars
Simple: Convenient joystick gives instant […]

Well, an hour of sky-gazing later, I’ve seen two meteors.
One was spectacular, one rather barely visible; both were very, very brief. Both were beautiful, but I didn’t see anything near 100 an hour, or even 10 an hour.

I went for another night-time walk today and was rewarded by a wonderful conjunction of Venus and the Moon.
Of course, upon leaving the house and seeing how beautiful it was nothing would do but to haul out the digital camera, tripod, and set up on a nearby street to try to capture the scene. Here’s […]

I just came back from an exhilarating night-time walk.
The night is the best time to walk: cool, quiet, and, if the sky is clear, there’s a vast celestial show playing on the biggest screen you’re ever gonna see.
Even in my rather light-polluted environs, the Milky Way was clearly visible. The familiar Big Dipper was huge […]

I went out star-gazing last night with some astronomical binoculars I purchased a month and a half ago.
We’ve been having the most incredible beautiful clear sunny days here … and clear sunny days mean clear night skies - an amateur astronomer’s delight. I made my way down to McDonald Park, a nice reasonably-dark-sky site near […]