I Saw Four Planets In The Sky At The Same Time
Something unusual is going on in our night skies at the moment, and it’s wonderful. And it’s a great way to start what will hopefully be a great year for astronomy, and my tenth year of doing astronomy. For the next few weeks, all of the planets except Mercury will be…
Will We Find Life On Europa, And If So What Happens Next?
In a few hours, weather permitting, a rocket will launch, which will send the Europa Clipper to the Outer Solar system. It’s always a bit surreal to me when launches are delayed due to bad weather, not because bad weather isn’t a real threat, it is, but it’s the fact that,…
Distance
Something that has always given me a strong sense of calm, and often a strong sense of wonder, is seeing something that is very far away. Being on top of a hill, or a mountain, and seeing a far off village, or town, or other mountain, that might take as much…
Seeing An Asteroid For the First Time
The Asteroid Vesta, For Some Reason It Looks Like A Satellite, Astronomy Sketching Can Be Weird Sometimes I’ve seen many types of astronomical objects over the years, galaxies, open clusters, globular clusters, and a small few nebula. I’ve seen craters on the moon with hills inside them. I’ve seen the surface…
My Fears And Hopes For 2024
2023 was a strange beast of a year. It marks some of the best experiences of my life, but also, if not the worst experiences, at least some very bad ones. So I don’t know what this post will be like, I’m thinking it might lie somewhere between coherent and incoherent,…
The Andromeda Galaxy, We Only Have 4 Billion Years To Get Out Of The Way
16th November 2023. Look at it there threatening to kill our very distant descendants, BOOOOO!!! So, it looks like your very, very distant descendants are in for a very, very bad time. Because the Andromeda Galaxy and the Milky Way Galaxy are going to collide in 4 billion years time. So…
Uranus, The Planet That’s At A Mad Angle
21st January 2021, My Only Sketch Of Uranus I only saw Uranus and sketched it once with my telescope, it’s far further out than Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, which you can just spot with the naked eye first and then train the telescope on it. But I find with Uranus…
Bode’s Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy, Two For The Price Of One
9th July 2018 These two galaxies had a level of courtesy rarely seen these days in that they are very close together, so you can see both of them at the same time through a telescope. I remember in 2015, the year I bought my first telescope, seeing my first ever…
My Favourite Hellscape
Not Safe For Humans Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s a furious deathworld of extremely deathy death! So, I’ve explained that this sketch is associated with extreme hellishness, so what do you think it is? It’s the planet Venus. I realized Venus was out last…
Saturn, the Second Best Planet In the Solar System
I remember, and I don’t believe I’ll ever forget it, my first time seeing Saturn through a telescope. There was a small light in the sky, and I wasn’t sure what it was but I thought I’d point my telescope at it, maybe it was Saturn. I looked at the light,…
The Best Thing About Winter
So, what do you think is the best thing about Winter? Let me save you time, if your answer was anything other than “The return of the Orion Nebula”, then you are wrong, objectively wrong. We may each of us disagree on anything from musical taste to political issues, but how…
Jupiter, The Planet Where Loads Of Stuff Happens
Okay, technically, more stuff doesn’t happen on Jupiter than on Saturn, Uranus, or, what’s the other greenish one, the one with the lions, oh yeah, Earth, but because Jupiter is so big, and relatively (I really stress reletively!), near, you can see a lot of interesting stuff there. So join me…
The Year Mars Got Really, Really Big
2020 was a great year for me, one of the best years of my life in fact. Now, if you’re reading this in the far future, you’re probably thinking, what year was that, was that Brexit, which Marvel film came out that year, or was that the year the United States…
Messier 92, An Old Classic Of Astronomy, Emphasis On Old
So it was a clear night last night, though there was a very bright moon. Though one lesson astronomy has taught me repeatedly, even when I won’t listen, is take what you can get! You’ll like a clear night with a bright moon much better than you’ll like a moonless night…
The Great Cluster of Hercules
Isn’t This The Cutest Globular Cluster You Ever Did See? So it was a clear night last night, and knowing I might not get another clear night for a while, I went into the shed and dragged out my ten inch telescope. Then I got my pencils and sketch pad, and…
Ponderings Of An Autist 