Exploring the Suffolk Virginia Night Sky – Astronomy, Astrophotography, Telescopes, EAA – Planets and Stars and Nebula and Galaxies – Looking, Learning, Sharing… Let's see what we can see…
Been a bit since we have had a clear sky here in Southeastern Virginia. The last time I had the opportunity to collect some light was on Mother’s Day. The forecast for Tuesday night looked decent so I set up the SeeStar…
I was looking to learn something new and to try out some different options for astrophotograpy imaging command and control. I have been using KStars/Ekos/INDI to control my gear for both EAA and Astrophotography session. KStars/Ekos/INDI works great but I wanted to…
I believe that any telescope can be a good telescope if you have the right expectations of it’s capabilities. I often get asked “What kind of telescope should I get?” My usual answer is get the best one you can afford for…
I have had my Sky Watcher EQ6-R Pro mount for a bit over a year now and it is a fantastic mount! Great payload capacity and solid performance with my typical guiding RMS around 1 arcsecond or less. Recently I noticed when…
After a couple weeks of a whole lot of clouds, Sunday was a nice night. Temperatures in the mid-50s, clear, and only a little sliver of a Moon. It has been a bit since I collected any light in the SV503 (been…
A coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetic field on May 10th, sparking a giant geomagnetic storm with auroras visible as far south as Florida. I did not expect for us to see any here due to the clouds, but… just after…
The SeeStar S50 comes with everything you need to start observing in just a few minutes after opening the box, however there are a few useful accessories which are really nice to have. The SeeStar S50 accessories I recommend for your SeeStar…
I have been traveling for work the past couple of days. I took the SeeStar with me, unfortunately cloudy nights prevented me from doing any observing while on the road. I returned home to a nice clear sky so I put the…
It was a long day for a Friday, just a lot going on at work. I had a break in the early afternoon and need to destress a bit, so I set up the SeeStar S50 with the included solar filter to…
GraXpert is a free opensource tool which can use Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to perform background extraction (gradient removal) and denoising (noise removal) on astrophotography images. I have been tinkering with this tool using a FITS image saved from a live stack…