Tag: astronomy
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Observing Weekend
This weekend I was pleased to have been invited with a few other people to go spend a night at the Manastash Ridge Observatory in eastern Washington. It’s about a 120 mile drive away from my house, and we headed out from the Seattle area around 11am on Saturday. After arriving, we were treated to…
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A roller coaster of a week
This has been a week of ups and downs. The week started off in a downhill slide. As many of you know, Microsoft laid off around 3,000 of my coworkers this week. Fortunately, I wasn’t one of them, but I have a great deal of good friends who were affected by this second round of…
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Goldendale Star Party
This weekend, a few members from the Seattle Astronomical Society held an unofficial star party out near Goldendale, WA. Since I didn’t get the chance to take on the Table Mountain Star Party a few weeks back, I was determined to make this event. It was an easy sell on the homefront as well, what…
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Photo from the weekend star party
Thanks to Nick for capturing this one: That’s Diann leaning on the Prius, me standing on the sidewalk, and a black-tailed deer just beyond my telescope.
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Weekend in Port Angeles
Diann & I spent the weekend on the peninsula, mostly in the Port Angeles area. We attempted to hit up the Hurricane Ridge Star Party put on by the Olympic Astronomical Society, but were foiled by clouds. (funny aside here: I showed up, along with Nick who is also a member of the Seattle Astronomical…
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Clear skies on the weekend
This weekend had some more clear skies, and I had been warned well in advance. I cleared the Saturday morning calendar, and packed up back out to Rattlesnake Lake with a bunch of the SAS guys for some viewing. The seeing and transparency were phenomenal – a very stable atmosphere with not much crud in…
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Where’s Marius been?
ok, so my last post was about two weeks ago… I’ve been busy, honestly. Let me summarize: Attempt at stargazing on June 14. Clouds were supposed to clear away, but never really did. No new Messiers off my list, but I did get to re-visit a few globulars and a few galaxies (M81/M82, in particular). …
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5/30 Astronomy Report
The weather looked promising last night, and the ClearSkyChart was reporting good news. At around noon, I shot a quick e-mail over to a few of the people I’ve viewed with before, and was happy to get a quick response from Barry (who lives near Rattlesnake) that the skies were in fact clear. I cleared…
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The weather is warming and the clouds are vanishing
Seattle in the summertime, oh how I love it. Today, the temperature breached the 80°F mark, and there hasn’t been a cloud in the sky. A sign of things to come. As has become common practice for me now, anytime there hasn’t been clouds, I’ve been out at night with the telescope and last night…
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Cold weather and more viewing
I looked at the Clear Sky Chart for my local viewing area a few days back, and I noticed a wonderful combination of things: Friday night was scheduled to be clear and the moon wasn’t going to rise until 2am. Friday night being a weekend meant I didn’t have to get up early the next…