A nebula (from Latin: "cloud";[1] pl. nebulae or nebulæ, with ligature or nebulas) is an interstellar cloud of dust, hydrogen gas, helium gas and other ionized gases

Collimation...There I said it! It's what's been keeping me out of the game since last week and what caused my limping a round the house mumbling weird astro-techie terms to my wife all weekend! The astronomers out there now it and most of us hate it. We hate having to deal with it and we certainly hate wasting precious observing time tweaking and adjusting again and again until we get it right. This is what I'm doing at the moment and when I'm not adjusting things at the scope I'm actually reading about it and studying different points of view on the matter trying to figure out exactly how to go about it!

I found a small point of light in the end of the tunnel though and next clear & steady night I should have results to show!
I dont see it for the next couple of days as we have rather fast winds approaching.

Hey there! So I've just finished another run and I'm processing the data as I type. Here's the first view at 18:18 UT with Io (who had re-emerged from eclipse a while ago and I saw that LIVE!), the GRS and OvalBA. More to follow soon!

p.s. I will be editing this post as the images come out of processing.
p.s. 2 (nov20) Here's more images out of processing! What was especially interesting, is the bright area in the northern EZ which was visible in the live feed.

Just watch. Unbelievable footage and images of the Night Sky taken by amateur astropographers working on ESO's VLT facility in Atacama desert, Chile.

It's that time of the year again! The Leonid meteor shower will be on display on the nights of 17-18 November! Unfortunately all but the brightest meteors will be obscured by the bright Moon and only those who will stay out until the early hours of the morning, after the Moon sets, will have a chance to witness up to 20-25 meteors per hour. Click on the image below to view a where-to-look chart from stardate.org!

It was a weird day with weird looking clouds! Take a look at these formations of Mammatus clouds I photographed over Nicosia around 16:00 yesterday. According to wikipedia they are: "...a cellular pattern of pouches hanging underneath the base of a cloud. The name mammatus, derived from the Latin mamma (meaning "udder" or "breast"), refers to a resemblance between the characteristic shape of these clouds and the breast of a woman."

p.s. So the word "Mamma" comes from the Latin word for "breast"?

...not really! I've just received my Hubble-Optics "5-star" artificial star! This should aid me in collimating my C9,25 telescope when the need arises!

First thoughts: It could have been better built...but then again for $20 it's no big deal!

The past few days have been extremely interesting for pro & amateur astronomers all over the world as we are all glued on Jupiter trying to capture as many images as possible of the gradual yet spectacular return of the Southern Equatorial Belt.
Here's my image from November 10, with the SEB outbreak spot in its very early stage!