This annual event is sponsored by the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York in conjunction with the Urban Park Rangers.  Stargazing in Central Park's Sheep Meadow will be hosted by numerous amateur astronomers (and their telescopes!).  More details are available at the announcement page at the AAANY web site: http://www.aaa.org/index.aspx?LOBID=952

If you are New York City, this weekend is the annual Urban Starfest held in Sheep Meadow (Central Park).

I had a rather long outage due to a botched upgrade from which I am still recovering.  I had planned on upgrading from Fedora 8, to 9, then 10, and finally 11.  You have to upgrade incrementally, but the first step failed part way through after having started installing packages.  An attempt to retry crashed even earlier.  At that point, I decided to try a clean install of Fedora 11 while preserving my data partitions then recover configuration files from backup.  That failed, too.  Sigh. 

While at the Summer Star Party, after taking all those frames of the double cluster, I decided to try M45, the Pleiades.

This is not the first time I took pictures of this cluster, but it is the first time I took a lot of exposures to insure I had plenty of data.

This is not a particularly pretty picture, especially compared to some, but like the others, its starting to show promise.  This was taken from a dark location north of Cape Girardeau, MO on a very warm and muggy early summer night.

Well, the recent burst of image processing from my June images has revealed a few issues with my AstroTrac's performance.  Up until now, I've attributed the errors I've had to the tripod and head on which I mount the AstroTrac.  However, at this point, I'm not sure that's the whole story.

This is one of my favorite areas of the sky and I first fell in love with the rich variation of color and texture after seeing an image taken by Akira Fuji.  Ever since then, It's been high on my list of areas I'd like to image.  Unfortunately, it's also rather difficult to do that from the northeast US and here in Brooklyn, well you can  "fuggedaboutit."[1]