Observations under
the night sky

July 30, 2026

A sad reality of our time is that, across North America, summers are now accompanied by wildfire smoke. This July, the bulk of it came from northern Ontario...

July 15, 2026

Observing conditions in Washington, DC have been largely disappointing since last winter. Every time I stepped out with my Takahashi refractors, setting up with great anticipation...

November 8, 2025

As I've chronicled in these pages for nearly a decade (!), autumn is my favorite time to observe the heavens here in Washington, DC. The air is crisp, the mosquitoes are scarce (usually), the...

August 24, 2025

For one week every year, I get to experience a truly dark sky – a 1 or at worst a 2 on the 9-level Bortle scale. At Riding Mountain National Park, near the western edge of Manitoba in the Canadian...

June 28, 2025

At around 10:00 PM on April 17th, I waited beside a railroad track that winds along the banks of the Susquehanna River in rural Pennsylvania. I had found a nook of open sky between trees and...

June 7, 2025

It's been a while, but my lack of new posts has a good cause: I finished my next book , and it's just about ready to debut later this year (October 28th, to be precise). The book tells - as my...

September 12, 2024

I haven't written much this year, owing in large part to my frantic quest to finish revising my next book,  Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean. Revising a book always makes you wonder why you decided to...

March 27, 2024

Our indefatigable news media seems to have transformed every full Moon into a show-stopping event. It's always a super blue wolf harvest something or other. To be fair, the hype stirs up a good deal...

March 26, 2024

Electronically Assisted Astronomy (EAA) has been around for a while. Not long ago, you'd get into it by buying a camera, attaching it to your eyepiece, hooking it to a monitor, and then watching as...

February 23, 2024

Usually, the atmosphere is turbulent during our DC winters, but this winter has been an exception. The reason might have to do with atmospheric circulation rerouted by a particularly intense El...