ASSNE.ORG

Ahhhhh. Superb. You folks have given me a wonderful set of choices!
- Mark

For quite a few years, I've been using Weather Underground (wunderground.com) to make decisions about overnight observing. But I'm finding that there are a number of nights that Weather Underground forecasts 40+% cloud cover that actually end up being pretty clear. What sources do you all use for we...

I was out at UMass last night and the sky was workable for quite a while before clouds rolled in. (I'm really growing to appreciate the great horizon available there -- almost makes up for the terrible light pollution.) There was a skunk wandering around outside the observatory; depending on the dir...

It's always great to hear about success stories like this. I've personally had wonderful experiences with the mount manufacturer 10Micron. I sent them a description of an intermittent startup problem with my mount on a Friday afternoon, and by Monday afternoon they had released a new firmware versio...

I had a recent experience with cables that froze. Literally. I had purchased some inexpensive USB cables on Amazon, and when the temperature went down into the teens the cheap insulation became brittle and started flaking off whenever I slewed the telescope, causing the cables to flex. Lesson learne...

I like both of them! I'm a "star guy" and like anything with lots of stars. How do you combine the Ha with the traditional RGB images? Do you map the Ha to a red color (as the eye would see it), or do you use one of the "wonky" palettes like Hubble uses? (I think they often map H...

Tony: Fascinating! Your selection criteria sorts stars into three "candidate" categories. Is there a way to promote a star from "candidate" status to "confirmed"? (For example, if a pair has been observed through half a complete orbit, it should be possible to promote i...

Pete: Nice job on a really challenging target... Your experience with moonlight and other sky background glow is strongly confirming my own experience that getting good flats can be really hard. Further, it's difficult to "debug" the process of making and applying flats, so that when the r...

Mike:
That's a great list! Thanks for posting.
- Mark

Happy New Year, everybody!

May we enjoy clear, steady skies this year.
May climate change bring us cloudless nights, instead of fog and drizzle.
May the wildfires be small, smokeless affairs this year.
And may we all enjoy perfect skies for the upcoming eclipse...

Happy holidays!
- Mark