The 2019 Winter Star Party “WSP” will be held at Camp Weesumkee in 2019 from February 4 – 10. The upcoming event will feature its long-awaited return to the Florida Keys as it was displaced in 2018 due to the devastating effects of Hurricane Irma. It has taken a tremendous […]
Tim DeBenedictis with Southern Stars has announced that Orbitrack, its iOS app for tracking satellites, is now updated to version 2.1. Orbitrack is a thorough rewrite of Southern Stars’ 2013 Satellite Safari app offering a brand-new, augmented-and-virtual-reality satellite tracker and spaceflight simulator. Orbitrack will tell you when spacecraft pass overhead, […]
“By Matt Harmston” I Want to Image the Skies, But Do I have to Process My Images? I used to think to myself, “Everything we see in the magazines and online (that isn’t sketched) shows processed images, but what is the big deal with all of this processing?” What did […]
By Donald Pensack Most beginner telescopes come with a single eyepiece. Thinking that most beginners would want something more in the way of power than the lowest possible power (which yields the largest true field of view), the manufacturers provide an eyepiece that, charitably, is a “jack of all trades […]
If you’re ready to swap out your standard Plossl eyepieces for oculars that will take your observing game to the next level, you should check out the Orion Telescopes & Binoculars EF Widefield 1.25″ Eyepieces. The “EF” stands for Extra Flat, which means that Orion’s EF Widefield Eyepieces are designed […]
The Achilles’ heel of rich-field achromatic refractors is chromatic aberration, but when you goal is scooping up ultra-wide, low-magnification views of the Milky Way, who cares about chroma. Witness Orion Telescopes & Binoculars’ versatile new f/5 CT80 80-mm Compact Refractor ($109.00US) designed to excel at wide-field observations – day or […]
Fifth Star Labs’ Sky Guide iOS app enjoys a near perfect score of 4.9 from the almost 70,000 users who have taken the time to rate it … which is, well, astonishing. There is ample reason for its popularity, though, given the WOW! factor of its thousands of breathtaking celestial […]
With greatly improved optics over its predecessor, the Orion 8- to 24-mm Pro Lanthanum Zoom eyepiece ($199.99US) now features high-end lanthanum glass lens elements, which greatly minimize chromatic aberration. The result is clean, crisp images free of color fringing. Ideal for both astronomical and terrestrial visual applications, this new zoom […]
The Cosmic Watch iOS and Android apps marry the functions of a world clock and an astronomical clock into a beautifully-rendered, uniquely-instructive interface. Celestial Dynamics, the apps developer, refined the functionality of the app in Version 2.0 and has produced a short video that highlights the recent improvements. The big […]
The headline says it all: “Motion Sensing.” Which means, no more fumbling for a tiny switch. You wear a headlamp to keep both hands free, but how free is your dominant hand when its priority is turning your headlamp on when needed and off when not. In addition to its […]
If you’ve got a Dob, you’ve likely done it – resorted to zip bags of lead fishing sinkers or ankle weights duct-taped to your OTA. Well, you can stop with the ugly tape residue. There’s now a practical, versatile counterweight solution for fine balance of your Dobsonian. Steel-tube Dobs are […]
Rigel Systems recently introduced the PulsGuide Jr ($39.95US), a shorter (by 1/2 inch) version of its popular PulsGuide guiding telescope eyepiece illuminator for finders. Both illuminators are designed to attach onto the illuminator port of an eyepiece equipped with crosshair or micrometer reticle. These eyepieces are used for guiding during […]