Allen is an amateur astronomer, an IT professional, a podcaster, a father of five growing kids, a barely competent chess player, and the owner and publisher of the Urban Astronomer podcast and website. He has formerly served as Director of the Astrophotography and Citizen Science sections of the Astronomical Society of South Africa. You can find his personal social media feed on Mastodon!
This past weekend I was planning to image a galaxy known as the Southern Pinwheel. Everything was perfect: The weather was cold and dry, the galaxy was nice and high in the sky, and it was a good dark night. I spent a bit of time with my trusty Deep Sky Hunters atlas, Stellarium and Cartes du Ciel planning my route to find the thing. I set up the scope in the afternoon so that I would have plenty light … Continue reading →
Apologies for the misleading headline. Nobody is predicting weather on planets outside of our Solar System. We’re just monitoring and recording it (as previously discussed here), and have been for some time. But recent observations of a very near pair of brown dwarf objects has led to something new: We’re watching the weather on stars themselves! Sorry, that was also misleading. Brown Dwarf’s aren’t technically stars since they sit on the hazy boundary between the largest gas-giant planets and the … Continue reading →
Good news for anybody in the Gauteng province of South Africa who is interested in astronomy or light pollution: I have been given the exciting opportunity to present a talk on 28 June for the Rhenosterspruit conservancy on Light Pollution and its effects on humans and the environment. I always enjoy giving these talks, and I’d love to have you all join us for the talk, and for a picnic/braai afterwards. Bring your telescope, if you have one, or look … Continue reading →
Some time ago, I wrote about my cunning plan to build the lightest, cheapest possible observatory: Plant a pier in my back yard, attach a telescope to it and use that as the base of my observations and photography. At that stage, I was about half-way excavating a hole for the pier, and had run into difficulty with a large rock placed exactly where I didn’t need it. Read on to see how I dealt with that problem, and how … Continue reading →
I am constantly amazed at how suddenly astronomers learned how to discover new exoplanets. When I was in high school, planets were often assumed to exist around other stars, but nobody ever expected to be able to see one. After all, trying to see an object as small as a planet next to something as bright as a star, from light years away, is like trying to spot a moth circling a floodlight from across the city. And yet in … Continue reading →
