Night Sky Network Website Changes

New Changes for Nasa's Night Sky Network Page. You are a part of an astronomy club that is hooked up with the Night Sky Network then this is for you:

Website Spotlights: Cloudy Night Telescope Reviews

One of my favorite places to hang out on the internet is the Cloudy Night Telescope Reviews website. This website has many reviews of telescopes and astronomical gear, but the thing that I enjoy the most is the Forum. I invite you to take a look at the resources this site offers, especially the forum, where you will find many helpful people. It was because of this site that I took part in a challenge of making a telescope for under $100, I did so in January 2009 when I made the 4" "Helotescope" more on that later.

Website Spotlight: Messier45.com

"Messier45.com constitutes a non-commercial effort to provide the deep sky observer's most valuable tools online; the map and the lists of objects. Great effort is made to make accurate data accessible to both the novice and experienced observer."- According to the website itself.

I stumbled upon this website on Halloween morning. From the start it peaked my interest since I'm really a deep sky fan.

I really like the Deep Sky Browser. A user has to register (free of charge) but this is a powerful too for planning. It is basically an online database that presents the information if a spreadsheet type of layout. It gives the RA and Dec, Magniture, Constellation, Type, Classification, Size, and SkyAtlas Number for each object as well as many much more user selectable information. If you wanted to get more details on a specific object you can click it and it will show a detailed page listing all the other names of the object, and even 3 star charts to help you star hop there. Also provided is a photograph of most objects so you can verify what you are looking at.

The Messier Gallery is fun to look at. It shows pictures of each Messier Object. There are dozens of sites out there that have this but this is by far the best I've seen.

There is a Hershal 400 section for all those Dim Objects. The Articles and Guides section has some good reading.

Go out and take a look at this website I think you might want to bookmark it.

Website Spotlights: Andy's Shot Glass

This is the first of my "Website Spotlights" and for the honor I have chosen my favorite astronomical website "Andy's Shot Glass". One of the main things I like about this website is the authors straight forward approach to astronomy. The website subtitle is "Astronomy and Astrophotography for Non-Gazillionaires." Andy has some great advice on this site and my recommended gold nugget of the website that I believe any Newtonian owner should view would be the Collimation a Newtonian video in the Articles-DIY section. I encourage you to take a look at the site and bookmark it. I'm sure you will find it as enjoyable as I have.

My website is like Polaroid and Kodachrome...geocities??

So this is my first blog.. I do (or did) have a website devoted to my hobby of astronomy, however that will soon not exist. Unfortunately, earlier this week I logged in to my geocities.com account to update my astronomy site and there was a message to the effect that soon geocities.com will no longer be in around. Seems things are changing in 2009!

I'm truly sad that my http://geocities.com/astro2matt/ account might be moved to yahoo's recycling bin. Honestly I'm not clear on if it will be saved or when it will be trashed so I thought I'd give blogger.com a try. A good astronomer friend of mine has been using blogger for a while I encourage you to have a look at his site Rick's Wildly Successful Astronomy.

-Matthew