The Eclipse Feeling

It was like someone turned down the Sun with a dimmer switch.  The tempurate dropped quickly, enhanced by the lack of moisture in the dry mountain air.  In a span of an hour, the Sun looked the same, but was very different, as totality approached.  I was taking photos through my telescope with an attached solar filter, so I could see the Moon slowly covering the Sun.  But as the environment changed in Northern Wyoming, I grew more excited for what was to come.  Over a year of preparation for this event, and clear skies greeted me with the confidence...

Testing Eyesight and Being Mistaken for the Little Dipper for Thousands of Years

If you guessed that I was referring to the Pleiades, you are correct.  The small open star cluster, Messier 45, is about 440 Light Years from Earth, relatively close for a star cluster.  We are able to see it with the naked eye in Autumn and Winter here in the Northern Hemisphere. The stars in the Pleiades are young and bright blue, meaning they are very massive and hot.  By young, I mean somewhere around a hundred Million Years, about 40 times younger than the Sun.  The smears of blue in the above photo show that the cluster is still...