so I went out after midnight (and didn’t get out of bed till 3pm today!) with binoculars and lounge chair and clipboard. [...]

It’s been cloudy and rainy (except for a few brief moments of sunshine) for almost a week now! I’m sure there are stars up there somewhere, but I can see no evidence from here. It’s times like this that “blimp telescope” idea sounds good. So… here is my sketch of M51 through [...]

Deneb, or Alpha Cygni is one of the three stars of the summer triangle and is the “top” of the northern cross. Because Cygnus is in the Milky Way, you see a rich starfield in binoculars–the drawing doesn’t begin to do justice to the Deneb starfield, especially under a dark sky. Many stars [...]

Sometimes the binoculars give a better view than the telescope. That is true with the asterism known as the Coathanger. In the telescope image, some stars are cut off by the narrow field of view, but the whole asterism appears in binoculars. Here is an older observation of Collinder 399, the Coathanger, [...]

The easiest way to find the Beehive cluster (M44) this year is to find Saturn, as the constellation it is in (Cancer) is very dim. If you aim your binoculars at Saturn and move a little left, you will see a collection of stars much like a swarm of bees. The field of [...]

The sky is so hazy I cannot even see bright M13 in binoculars. So, here is an older observation. M81 is Bode’s Galaxy, a spiral. M82 is the Cigar Galaxy, an irregular that is dimmer than M81. The two are not just in the same place in the sky, they are [...]

I realized I had sketched the comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 when it was in Lyra, thus capturing, by pencil, an image paralleling the photograph I took yesterday. So, I prepended that observation to that page–it is now the first observation of the three comet observatoins on [...]

I thought I’d look through the telesocpe tonight, as the Clear Sky Clock seemed to be in my favor. But–it was so hazy I could see very little. I tried something “easy” (M13), but couldn’t find it. So I used my binoculars….I couldn’t find it there either! It has to be [...]

not tonight anyway. Of course, I work tomorrow and don’t want to be up late tonight. I also play saxophone [...]

Last may, I observed comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 at its closest approach to Earth. At its brightest, it showed up in binoculars on a reasonably-dark night. The image reminded me of an angel–the tail fanned out like a robe or gown. The link above gives my observation reports for two observations of Fragment [...]