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Great info. I always thought it was an 11 year cycle but that must be short of what’s happening now.

Josef, thanks for the spell check. I’ve been saying it wrong for years. 😮

And thanks for turning out the light.

Check this out. I got a Cricut for my daughter and I decided to print out a tribute to Dean for my scope. Just added this…[Read more]

Beautiful images of the northwest horizon with crepuscular rays! I added one of them with the crescent Moon to the article about Root River Park.

Terrific Milky Way shot Duane! Nice corpuscular rays. Glad you two had fun at Root River.
I’ve been following solar cycle 25 closely on unmanned spaceflight. I don’t think the cycle has peaked as yet, at least based on sunspot numbers. Check out this link: https://spaceweather.com/images2024/02aug24/sunspotnumber2.jpg

Also, Joseph spotted this… Corpuscular rays shooting upward!

Ooooo….   What scope and mount did you get? Do tell!

I’m thinking the same thing… I want the rig I want and it’s taking forever to get it; but eventually I’ll get there. I keep seeing cheaper compromising equipment for less and I keep ignoring it, but it’s so tempting.

Equipment I need to get to finish my setup: Astro-Camera (preferably the…[Read more]

Here’s the Milky Way shot I took last night:

I was lazy and stayed at my home observatory last nite.  Good skies for sure, so I hope Josef and Duane enjoyed observing at Root River.  I have a new mount and scope and was educating myself on how to operate them.  The mount is the HEQ5 Pro and the scope is the Quattro 150P, all Sky Watcher hardware.  Spent $2000+ of my savings, but hey I’m not…[Read more]

That is one big sun spot! I think we’re now past the active part of the sun’s cycle and it’s supposed to be gradually calming down. That seems to be taking a while.

I just went outside, put on my eclipse sunglasses and looked with the naked eye at the big sunspot. Here is SDO image https://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/browse/2024/08/07/20240807_170000_512_HMIIC.jpg:

Weather forecast for tonight Tue 8/6 looks promising. I plan to go to the Root River park to make sure the light is switched off.

Thanks for posting. Looking up it was pretty good. I could see all the stars in the Little Dipper and a lot more within that I normally can’t see. But that was looking most upward. Looking at the northern horizon was hazy (see pic).

Looking east and west, all but the brightest stars disappeared.

Great sky while looking upward, but the lower you…[Read more]

Excellent members event at Eagle Bluff last night and early this am.
A zenith dark sky recording is shown below

Looks like you are prepared for the spectacle Duane!  Looking at magnitude data of T CrB from AAVSO today, shows an unusual fluctuation in brightness https://apps.aavso.org/webobs/results/?star=000-BBW-825&num_results=200

Not sure of the meaning of this, but wouldn’t it be great if tonight was the night and we were observing at Eagle Bluff!

The Blaze Star is probably going to saturate on my camera… I’m going to keep working it out and see if I can figure out how to get the whole light curve. I don’t think my camera can get the whole 8 magnitudes in the same exposure setting. It will be interesting. I’m glad it hasn’t blown yet.

Answer to Question.