My observing article in the September 2023 Sky & Telescope

Whew — it’s been a minute! Ironic, then, that this post is probably right on the cusp of being too late. The Sky & Telescope for a given month is on newsstands the month before the cover date, and it usually hits newsstands a week or so before that. So I’d expect the October S&T to appear on newsstands at the end of this month, but I’ve already seen it out in the wild. Which means the September issue is about to get yanked. 

ANYWAY, I have a feature article in the September issue, and although some of my previous feature articles have gotten a notice on the cover, this time my piece is the cover article, which is a first for me. It’s a binocular tour of the late summer Milky Way, but it should be fun for telescopic observers, too. Go check it out, if it’s not too late! (And if it is, the issue will be in S&T online shop before long.) There’s also a finder chart for the article online, which seems to be a free download here.

Listen to me yap about the Caldwells for 45 minutes

Briefly: I wrote an article about the 25th anniversary of the Caldwell Catalog for the December issue of Sky & Telescope, and Frank Timmes of the American Astronomical Society interviewed me about it for the AAS YouTube channel. It was a fun interview and I’m grateful to Frank for his interest and for a fun conversation.

Summer lookback time: my article in the June 2018 Sky & Telescope

The June 2018 Sky & Tel should be on newsstands any day now, and it has a feature article that is the culmination of a personal quest. By far my favorite among my previous Sky & Tel articles is “Twelve Steps to Infinity” from the December 2016 issue. But as much as I love that article, it only covered the winter sky, so it was incomplete – I needed to do a matching article for the summer months. That’s the new article out this month, and it doesn’t just match “Twelve Steps”, it exceeds it. As I say in the new article, in it I “start out a little closer, end up much farther out, and see a more diverse set of targets”, from the closest star visible to Northern Hemisphere observers (other than the Sun), to a quasar more than two billion light years away.

I owe a huge thanks to my editor, Diana Hannikainen, for making the data table and for numerous improvements to the text. Her name’s not on the article, but it probably should be, so many and so helpful were her suggestions.

There’s a LOT of other interesting stuff in this issue. I’ve written here many times about my visits to the big historical telescopes on Mount Wilson and Palomar Mountain, all of which were built at the instigation of George Ellery Hale, whose legacy of monster scopes is explored in this issue. Also, there are not one but three articles on asteroids, the scars of past impacts, and the threat of future ones, which is timely given my recent talk on the subject.

I hope you enjoy my new article. As always, suggestions for improvements are welcome, and the comment field is open.

My articles in the 2018 SkyWatch and January 2018 Sky & Telescope

Two new things on newsstands right now. First, the 2018 issue of SkyWatch is out. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s an annual special issue put out by S&T, with monthly star charts for the whole year and lots of articles on equipment, observing, and photography. Most of these articles are aimed at folks who are new to the hobby, but hopefully even vets will learn some things.

As you can see from the cover, big articles this year include choosing a first telescope, learning to use a sky map, the best astronomy apps, and getting started with astrophotography. My contribution is a selection of bright, easy binocular targets from every major class of objects – double stars, planetary and diffuse nebulae, open and globular star clusters, and galaxies – covering every month, to keep you observing all year long.

The other thing is the January issue of Sky & Tel, in which I have a feature article. This one is a bino and small-scope tour of Milky Way through Perseus and Auriga, the third in a series that also includes my articles from December 2015 and March 2017. Will I make it all the way around the sky? I’d like to, but I suppose that’s up to the editors and readers of S&T. Stay tuned, and as always, let me know what worked and what didn’t in the comments.

(I actually have a third thing on newsstands right now – an excerpt from my dinosaur book with coauthor and paleoartist Mark Hallett is in this quarter’s issue of Prehistoric Times magazine. Head on over to SV-POW! for more about that.)

Binocular double stars in Draco: my article in the August 2017 Sky & Telescope

This one came about by accident. In February, 2016, I went down to Borrego Springs, California, to give a talk at the Western Association of Vertebrate Paleontologists annual meeting. After the conference, I went up to camp for the night at Culp Valley Campground in Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Anza-Borrego is a dark place to start with, and Culp Valley is up around 3500 feet and even farther from any towns or buildings, so it is stupid dark up there.

I got almost all the way around the sky with my binos that night, both in the early evening and then again before dawn. I was struck by how many nice binocular double stars there were in Draco. At first I was thinking I might use 3 or 4 of the best as the basis for a Binocular Highlight column, but pretty soon I was up to a dozen and I realized that I had enough ammo for an observing feature. I went back out this spring with a whole range of binoculars, up to and including mounted 15x70s, to re-observe and take notes. There are 20 doubles listed in the article, and although a few of them will require big binos to split cleanly, most can be split with 10×50 or even 7×35 binoculars, and a couple can probably be split with naked eyes if your vision is good.

If you want even more, or if you want to get a taste before you spring for a copy of the magazine, I also wrote an online feature with several more doubles that didn’t make the cut for the printed article. You can find that online feature here.

I’ve written for Sky & Tel on the Milky Way (twice), galaxies, and look-back time, and I’ve included individual double stars in Bino Highlight columns, but this is my first feature on double stars. What worked, what didn’t, what would you like to see in the future? The comment thread is open – I’ll look forward to hearing from you.

My article in the March 2017 Sky & Telescope

This is one was an easy write-up, because it had been in my head and in my notebook for a long time. Way back when I first got tapped to write for S&T, I pitched a tour of the winter Milky Way from Puppis to Gemini. I’d never written for a magazine before and I had no idea how much sky it would take to fill 1600 words. Turns out, all I got through on the first attempt was Canis Major, Puppis, and a couple of odds and ends like M48. That was my article in the December 2015 issue.

Right after that came out, I pitched the unfinished second half, and now it’s out. Like that first article, it’s a tour of the winter Milky Way pitched at binocular users, but hopefully useful for telescopic observers, too. This piece runs from Monoceros through northeastern Orion to southern Gemini. The March issue of Sky & Tel is probably hitting newsstands this week. If you get a copy, I hope you enjoy the article.

If you’re thinking that Gemini is a pretty arbitrary place to stop cruising the Milky Way, you’re not wrong. I can say no more for now, but stay tuned…

Update: whoops, I originally put January in the post title instead of March! This is, of course, the March issue, it just came out in January. Sheesh.

My new article in the December Sky & Telescope

It’s late and my computer is almost dead, so I’m just going to link to the longer announcement/acknowledgment post on my paleontology blog. Enjoy!

My article in the April 2016 Sky & Telescope

Getting this posted a bit belatedly, as this issue has been on newsstands for about a week already. When I wrote about my first S&T article last year, I said that my editor, JR, and I had “batted some ideas back and forth and quickly settled on the winter Milky Way”. The other ideas didn’t go away, they just got put off. This binocular tour of the Virgo Messier galaxies is one of those other ideas. Hopefully more will be along in the future – assuming I’m successful in bringing them to fruition, and that the staff – and readers! – of Sky & Telescope continue to be happy with them.

Incidentally, although I aimed the article at binocular users, it should serve as a perfectly cromulent guide for telescopic observations as well.

Have suggestions for how I can improve? The comment field is open.

My article in the December Sky & Telescope

Einstein has my article on his mind!

Here’s the exciting news I teased back in September: the December 2015 issue of Sky & Telescope, which is available online and should be hitting newsstands about now, has an observing article by yours truly. It’s a binocular tour of the southern stretch of the winter Milky Way, from Canis Major through Puppis to end in Hydra.

The road that led here started back in December, 2014, when I got a very nice email from S. Johnson-Roehr, “JR”, the observing editor for Sky & Tel. JR had stumbled across this very site (possibly because I’d just recommended the newly-reprinted Caldwell Objects?) and asked if I’d be interested in contributing an observing article. We batted some ideas back and forth and quickly settled on the winter Milky Way. I had been through this area of the sky before but I wanted to give it one more pass, both to flesh out my notes and to road-test the star hops I had in mind. I made those observations this spring, wrote the article over the summer, and now it’s out in the world.

I have one favor to beg of anyone who reads the article – I need feedback. This is my first time writing about astronomy anywhere but a blog, forum post, or club newsletter, and I’d like to know (1) what worked, (2) what didn’t, and (3) what you’d like to see in the future. The comment field is open.

There’s a lot more to like in this issue of S&T, some of which will be of particular interest to regular readers of this blog. Tony Flanders has another inexpensive telescope shoot-out. Back in 2011 he and Joshua Roth looked at $100 scopes, in particular the Orion SpaceProbe 3, GoScope 80, and SkyScanner 100 (that article is a free download here, and a follow-up comparing the SkyScanner to the StarBlast is here). This time Tony considers three scopes in the $200 range: the Meade Infinity 90mm refractor and alt-az mount, the Orion StarBlast 4.5, and the Astronomers Without Borders OneSky. I won’t give away any spoilers, except to note that he finds all three to be capable scopes, which I’m sure is no surprise around here.

Another nice review in this issue is Alan MacRobert’s look at the first two volumes of Jeff Kanipe’s and Dennis Webb’s Annals of the Deep Sky, from Willmann Bell. As a deep-sky junkie who likes to read himself to sleep with Burnham’s Celestial Handbook and Stephen James O’Meara, I have been curious about these new books, but I hadn’t heard anything about their quality before reading MacRobert’s article. Sounds like I need to make space on my Christmas list.

There’s loads more interesting stuff in this issue – cover articles on Einstein and gravitational waves, great observing articles by Alan MacRobert, Fred Schaaf, Gary Seronik, and Charles A. Wood, a very nice piece by Sue French looking at some neglected open clusters and double stars in Cassiopeia (an area I thought I knew well)…you get the picture. If you’re not a subscriber, you can find the December issue of Sky & Telescope on your local newsstand, or order a print or digital copy online here.

If you’re new here, welcome! Have a look around, and feel free to comment.