Blade Edge

Off to the Adirondacks!
As I planned last month, I’ll be making a trip north to the Adirondack State Park in New York starting tomorrow morning. Unfortunately only one of my friends is able to come, and the weather doesn’t plan on fully cooperating, but given that I plan to make this an annual trip, going [...]

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Shower Alert! This weekend will see the peak of the brilliant winter meteor shower the Geminids – Sunday night/Monday morning to be exact. Conditions look to be ideal with a sliver of a crescent moon leaving the sky nice and dark, so your only danger is cloud cover. As usual, Space.com has a great writeup [...]

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I’ve talked about how to find stellar objects, how to watch meteors, but never where to watch the skies for best effect – that is, where is light pollution less of a problem? In solving this problem, I got to watch a stunning Leonid shower and plan a trip into Canadian back country.
So I heard [...]

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Look! Up in the sky! Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s an Orionid meteor! Yep, it’s time once again to look to the heavens for a great night-time show. Seeing as I was robbed from seeing the last shower in August due to overcast skies, I look forward to more favorable [...]

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It’s time for some more meteor shower action! This upcoming shower, the Perseids, is one of the more spectacular showers you can see throughout the year so you don’t want to miss it. Even better is that forecasts are predicting a higher than average number of meteors will be sighted during the peak period of [...]

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Well, since this entire fracking week is going to be comprised of rain, rain and more rain (did I mention rain?) it appears I won’t be seeing any meteors from the Eta Aquarids this time around. Of course I can take solace in the fact that this is also true for the majority of the [...]

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Greetings, fellow meteor watchers! There seemed to be a nice reaction to my last post on meteor watching, where I spent about an hour or so under the black, moonless sky catching the Lyrids and other objects streaking across the night sky. Well today was the start of  yet another meteor shower, the Eta Aquarids. [...]

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I had the good fortune of the skies clearing up tonight around 3am – the past three days have been cloudy and rainy and I was giving up hope of catching the Lyrids metor shower during its peak period of tonight and last night. So I quickly launched Stellarium and typed Lyra into the search [...]

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Hello fellow stargazers. If you’re a backyard astronomy buff like myself who likes to look at the heavens every now and again, you may find this post interesting. I have to admit I haven’t done a whole lot of stargazing of late, mainly only when cool stuff comes around like eclipses or meteor showers or… [...]

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A bit of history…
I used to be quite the backyard astronomer when I was a kid. When I was around 8 or 9 I would use my dad’s binoculars to scope out the sky, not caring that after a few minutes my head felt like it was going to fall off my neck from looking [...]

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