Category: Astrophotography

2024 Solar Eclipse

Today was the second total eclipse in North America in my lifetime. I wasn’t able to get to totality in 2017 or today, but I did bring out my solar telescope for both events. In 2017, I took the scope up to an elementary school and had a great time showing the kids the moon crossing in front of the sun. Today, my youngest kid was home to view the eclipse with me.

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Jupiter, Saturn, & Mars

While updating some old blog posts to use my new gallery setup, I remembered I never posted some planetary images I had taken back in September of 2020. I had been wanting to get into astrophotography for a while and had even attempted it with my micro 4/3 camera with pretty poor results. After being bored during quarantine, I got a webcam-based imager and my god.

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2015 Lunar Perigee Eclipse

Last night, there was an interesting celestial event: the Earth eclipsed the Sun, casting it’s shadow on the Moon. This happened during lunar perigee (the Moon’s closest point to the Earth in it’s elliptical orbit), which resulted in a negligible increase in the Moon’s apparent size: about 14% larger than normal. I had worked earlier in the year to get my astronomy gear into a workable state. I de-mounted my telescope from it’s crappy factory mount and slapped it onto a much nicer and sturdier mount I bought around the beginning of summer.

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