By Stephen Dow and James Paulson With special thanks to Richard Berry for his guidance and insight on this endeavour. FORWARD This project came about because of a single slide in a presentation delivered by Eric of Celestron on his appearance on the ZOOM ASTRONOMY TALK meeting that we run once a month. When we asked Eric about the light curve on the slide, Eric reached out to a fellow by the name of Richard Berry of the AAVSO to see if we could learn more direct from him sinc

In several articles, I have discussed things we can do to improve the quality of our results. The last article on this site that was co-written with my friend Stephen Dow dissected a lot of things unique to the Celestron Origin, but all of which could be applied to any fixed data collection system, where you conduct experiments with the intent of collecting information to tweak a system.   Let’s talk about signal to noise ratio and what exactly this means and why it matters.

Authored by Stephen Dow and James Paulson We have been experimenting together for a couple of months now making all kinds of mistakes to learn this new device called Origin and its needs. We have been working together in tandem through any challenges we run into. We have come up with some general guidelines and observations on how best to expose various targets on the Celestron Origin using both the 178C and 678C camera.   Here in a nutshell is our very basic starter guide. P

For those of us who study this hobby called amateur astronomy, I think sometimes we forget some things that are right in front of us. Or perhaps we just never quite understand them. They really deserve to sit beside each other in an article to evoke those ideas though. Let’s begin   When you look out at the night sky, night after night, season after season, year after year, you don’t see chaos. What you see is predictability, a sense of calm, of relaxation, of time spent with

Why do we put new users through the funnel of “my experience” and bad "advice?"   What do you call bad advice? Is bad advice telling new people to the hobby that they should not buy a telescope, but rather learn star charts and naked eye observing, and then binoculars and finally move to "push to" Dobsonian scopes, Telrads, pocket-charts and finally after we master all of this, you might move to wide field astrophotography and finally then and only then when you need a mount

People have been asking me how I like the Celestron Origin. I will be honest. I really like it. I like it enough that I have listed my C8, my Hyperstar and my EQ6 up for sale because I won’t use it much anymore at all, and someone might as well enjoy it.   The only thing I do not like about the Origin and it’s not that big of a deal yet because I think it is more of a training issue than a technical issue is how the dovetail meshes with the mount and tightens. To me it is fla

Our annual Southern Alberta Star Party (SASP) was held this year from Sunday, September 21 st  to Friday September 26 th  at the...

NASA’s Perseverance Rover has collected some interesting results lately. Collecting samples from an ancient dry riverbed in Jezero...

I’ve been going back and forth on this idea for a while now about buying a Celestron Origin. I am going to tell you how I arrived at the...

Last week I attended the Saskatchewan Summer Star Party in Cypress Hills, Saskatchewan. I wanted to go and set up my tent with my big rig...

My lack of originality in naming this is profound, but I wanted people to understand the platform and the subject. It is astronomy talk...

I wanted to write a blog article on this process to hopefully save others some time because I have been down this road twice, and it is...

People ask what the secret is to getting great images.   First off there is no secret. There are processes that we all follow and refine...

I realize there are a lot of amateurs out there that have moved on in their mounts. Whether they are using ASTROPHYSICS and their line of...

When I bought my S50 in the Summer of 2024, I really didn’t hold high expectations for this little scope. It’s a first-generation smart...

Lately there has been a lot of hype in the media about travelling to Mars with the intent of colonizing it. Without naming any specific...

Image By Nrco0e - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Those pesky astronomers have been at it again. They have been out uncovering new things that...

I recently purchased an Antlia Tri-Band Ultra 2 inch filter for use with my Hyperstar 8. I did it based on advice that I received...

How often is it that we are shooting images, only to discover a satellite trail through the image? It’s annoying when you see that but...

Spring is here again, summer begins in one month, and that means that star party season is not far off. We all love those multi-evening...