Greetings all! Coordinating observatory use with Rick who had a number of students observing last night (Excellent!!!), club member Cecil and I worked on the modeling again last night. Modeling, if you recall, is the process where we fine tune the telescope mounts internal mapping of the sky to its exact latitude, longitude, and altitude […]
Greetings to all of you Lunartics! As you know, there will be a Lunar event on Sunday night beginning at approximately 9:30 PM and lasting until approximately midnight. I have received permission from the City of Riverdale, Iowa to again hold the public event on top of the hill in Riverdale at Bicentennial Park… weather […]
In the late summer of 1964 I was leaving the Observatory of the Royal Astronomical Society’s Montreal Centre with some friends, one of whom was David Zackon. I asked the group if they would like to drop by my house to observe with a 3.5-inch reflector. Before they had a chance to answer, David upped […]
Skyward April 2022 Omicron! Over the last few months you must have read dozens of articles, online or in print, about the Omicron variant of COVID-19. Fortunately, this is not one of them. This article is about Omicron² Eridani. It is a faint star in the constellation of Eridanus, the River. Actually, there are two […]
Skyward for March 2022 By David Levy Star Gazers What crowd is this? What have we here? We must not pass it by; A telescope upon its frame, and pointed to the sky… William Wordsworth, 1806 While I was working on my master’s degree at Queen’s University in Canada some 42 years ago, I […]
Skyward for February 2022 David Levy Go Webb! We all got a special and thoroughly delightful present early on Christmas morning. Although I did not set my alarm, Wendee did get up around 5 am. I turned on our television set, and what I saw 15 minutes later was the most thrilling space view since […]
Well, with a little bit of luck… short of doing some documentation, training and the open house… and the weather holding… I’ll be at the Wilton School Systems Observatory from 2PM until 10PMish doing the final touches on Thursday. The plan is to get there before dark and make sure everything is working and in […]
Hi all! Before heading into the STEM room I went into the observatory to check to make sure that things were safe in the observatory to remote in from the STEM room. While U was in there I did go ahead and do 1 Windows update followed by a restart. I also put the filter […]
Hi all! Lots if miscellaneous stuff today! I climbed a ladder to get to the weather station on the roof of the observatory and took close up pics of that Boltwood system… even tho it rained, the App shows dry which is fine as it is really windy so Dry is accurate… BUT… much of […]
Skyward for January 2022 By David Levy Imagination and the Astronomical League. “A Dragon Lives forever, but not so girls and boys.” Three quarters of a century ago, during the Second World War, the famous Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, along with Charles Federer, founding editor of Sky and Telescope Magazine, launched an association of astronomy […]