Last week, I started a series of blogs devoted to helping you construct a home observatory. One of the most important considerations involves choosing a site. Of course, you want the best overall location for your observatory, but is that 50 feet out the back door or 50 miles away at a dark site? The location must work for you. It must allow you the freedom to observe whenever it's clear. Because of that, generally, a closer location works best...

While most of my friends and colleagues were enjoying beautiful spring weather this past weekend, I was attending the annual meeting of the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) in Toledo, Ohio. The weather was beautiful there as well, but I spent most of my time indoors, attending talks by scholars from around the world and delivering one of my own. As always, the topics at the meeting ran the gamut of Egyptology. At various times through the...

Urban skies: The blaze of Venus (upper left) poses with the thin crescent Moon above downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin on April 19, 2007. Daniel Pendick I took this photo at about 8 P.M. last Thursday April 19. I live near downtown Milwaukee, at the south edge of the Brady Street neighborhood . My west, third-floor window looks out over Cass Park. The small raised area between the flowerpots is Brewer's Hill, a gentrified version of an old neighborhood...

One of the best things I've done in amateur astronomy is to construct a small observatory in the backyard of a former house. It's not that hard to do, and for this and the next six blogs, I'll outline how you can build your own observatory. When I began to think about what I wanted in an observatory, convenience ranked high on the list. I wanted to be able to step out into my yard and, with little preparation, observe. One night after...

In a previous blog post , I celebrated Wisconsin as an astronomical center. Forward-thinking politicos in the Dairy State want to create Spaceport Sheboygan — a private spaceport that will launch spacecraft carrying satellites, space-station payloads, and tourists. Why not? Sheboygan is more than a sibling of Walla Walla and Cucamonga as funny-sounding city names delivered by comedians working the Borscht Belt . While researching the spaceport's...

Setting: a lakeshore in southeastern Wisconsin. Saturday evening. 9 P.M. Dramatis personae: Susie; her husband, Tony; Susie's Mom; Susie's children, Hazel and Hannah; and Saturn, the ringed planet. Equipment: Tele Vue Ranger , a small but mighty 70 mm (2.75-inch) refractor. We have been hanging out by the bonfire most of the day, playing music and shooting the bull. It's now dark, and people are gradually drifting inside the house as the...

Now that humans have broken the green barrier — launching fabulously wealthy people into orbit — the Russian aerospace firm RKK Energia has proposed the next advance in commercial spaceflight: exporting toxic waste and other harmful processes off-world. The bearer of this bad news will be Energia's proposed Kliper/Parom launch system, envisioned as a replacement for the aging Soyuz system. It consists of two parts: a reusable glider...

If you're just getting interested in amateur astronomy, you may read with dismay statements like, "best seen from a dark site," "get away from city lights," and "galaxies cannot be seen under light-polluted skies." Well, I'm here to say you can observe lots of objects from a city. Galaxies, unfortunately, are not among them. I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do about this. Even wonderful astronomical devices...

As I write this, I'm looking out my office window at a raging snowstorm. A week ago, I was reaching for the AC knob in my car on the evening commute. Holy malevolent meteorology! Meteorology's province is the atmosphere, specifically the study and forecasting of the weather. As for the " meteor " in meteorology, Greek amateur astronomer Grigoris Maravelias explained it this way on an Internet discussion group about meteors : Meteor...

The first space shuttle flight came April 12, 1981, when the shuttle Columbia roared off the launchpad at Cape Canaveral. NASA "I see Earth. It's so beautiful!" Although these words don't resonate quite the way "That's one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind" do, they hold a special place in space-exploration history. Forty-six years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin uttered the words — the...