First Light

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 3, 2023

To put it mildly, it's been a dreadful summer for astronomy in Washington, DC. The primary culprit is wildfire smoke, which seems to waft into the city with every clear night. As a professor whose...

August 13, 2022

Binoculars have long frustrated me. While I've thrilled at catching glimpses of rocket launches or lunar craters with big Celestron binoculars here in Washington, DC, I could never hold them steady...

February 6, 2022

Two things have kept me from posting - and observing - these last three months. First: the weather. This has been about the worst stretch of cloudiness and terrible seeing that I can remember in DC....

September 25, 2021

We've had some wonderfully clear, autumnal nights over the past week, with Jupiter and Saturn riding high in the evening sky and the Moon waxing and waning nearby. I'm teaching what may be my...

November 21, 2020

On November 16th, the sky was clear and, after a glorious sunset, atmospheric seeing promised to be mediocre but transparency was predicted to be superb. With no Moon in the sky, conditions were...

November 12, 2020

We've enjoyed maybe the best stretch of clear nights with good seeing that I've experienced since moving to Washington, DC, and I was out nearly every night with a telescope in hand. Between work,...

October 18, 2020

After selling my EVScope recently - you can read more about that choice below - I sold a few other items and wound up with a nice chunk of change. I started feeling a familiar temptation, one I've...

September 5, 2020

My greatest weakness in this hobby - and maybe in life - is that I'm never sufficiently content with what I have. When I realized that my big refractor - the APM 140 - was just about as portable as...

July 3, 2020

Rocking a fussy baby is a dangerous thing. The mind latches on to anything that can distract from the crying, and for me that means telescopes. Could I really use my Mewlon 180, I wondered lately?...

March 30, 2020

Life - for me, for millions in the United States and around the world - has changed just a bit since I last wrote. Friends and students have fallen ill, and so many have lost their jobs. It feels...

November 9, 2019

So I may have contracted a mild case of aperture fever. Not the first time, and likely not the last. ​I caught a glimpse of the Ring Nebula with my 100mm Takahashi recently, and part of me was...

September 23, 2019

At the moment, Lyra and Hercules are high in the high, and Uranus and Neptune are near the annual oppositions. This got me thinking. My refractors are everything I'd hoped they'd be, but would they...

July 21, 2019

It's been a while since I wrote. I've come to realize that, with young kids, I just about never have the time to do something as decadent as write for fun. And I certainly don't have time to write...

December 12, 2018

About a year ago, I picked up a Skywatcher 100ED: a "slow" (F/9) 100mm refractor. I haven't written much this year, but wow: suffice it to say, I rarely use any other telescope (and when I do, I come...

February 24, 2017

​From the time I was a young kid growing up under the dark skies of rural Canada, I dreamed of owning an eight-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope. Glossy advertisements in astronomy magazines...

January 7, 2017

I received my Twilight I mount yesterday, and my 4-inch, AR 102 refractor arrived a few days earlier. It snowed in the afternoon, but cleared up around sunset. At the same time, I scouted a new...

August 22, 2016

After a hot, clear day that lacked the crushing humidity I've come to associate with DC summers, I decided to take out my new 4-inch, Celestron Omni XLT refractor. Mars was just a few months from its...