Meteors
The Meteor Camera Network Coming of Age
Anselm Bauer surveys the rapid maturation of amateur all-sky meteor camera networks in Europe and North America, and the modest equipment that puts a useful station in any home observer's garden.
Equipment editor
Anselm Bauer
Anselm Bauer has reviewed amateur telescopes for two decades. He edits Last Light's Equipment section from his back garden in Munich.
Beats
Published in Last Light
Dark Sites
Pic du Midi: the old tower and its quiet ridge
At 2,877 metres in the central French Pyrenees, a working observatory and a heritage hotel share a granite summit. France's first dark-sky reserve, certified in 2013, surrounds them. A spring evening at the cable-car station above Bagnères-de-Bigorre.
Equipment
The Observing Chair, the Red Light, and the Small Things That Matter
Anselm Bauer makes the case for a small set of overlooked accessories — a proper observing chair, a calibrated red flashlight, a notebook, a folding table — that change the experience of a night under the sky.
History
Chandrasekhar and the White-Dwarf Limit
On a 1930 steamer voyage from Madras to Southampton, an eighteen-year-old Indian physics student calculated the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf. The result was rejected, at length and in public, by Arthur Eddington.
Solar
Making a Solar Filter at Home: A Practical Guide and a Caution
A homemade objective filter, properly built from the correct materials, is safer than many commercial products. Anselm Bauer walks through the procedure, and the rules that have no exceptions.
Night Skies
An Evening with Albireo Through a 4-Inch Refractor
The most-shown double star in the sky, seen carefully from a back garden in Lyon, with notes on what the colours actually look like.
Equipment
Collimation Tools and the Quiet Discipline of Alignment
Anselm Bauer compares four collimation tools across a season of Newtonian use, and argues that collimation is not a chore but a small recurring conversation with an instrument.
Night Skies
Learning the Winter Hexagon as a Single Naked-Eye Object
Six bright stars, one large pattern, and the slow work of seeing the winter sky as a whole rather than a list of constellations.
Meteors
Fireballs and Where to Report Them
Anselm Bauer walks through the practical mechanics of fireball reporting — what to record in the first ninety seconds, which network to submit to, and why amateur reports matter.
Equipment
The Refractor's Blue Halo and What It Tells You
Anselm Bauer on chromatic aberration, the much-maligned purple fringe at the edge of bright stars, and why the inexpensive achromat is still a useful instrument.
Solar
Hydrogen-Alpha for the Amateur: One Filter, Many Suns
A Coronado PST, a Lunt LS50, a double-stacked rig in a Munich back garden: Anselm Bauer on what hydrogen-alpha really shows, and what it costs to see it.
Night Skies
A Year of Naked-Eye Observing, Without Equipment
What can be seen from a suburban backyard with no telescope, no binoculars, and only patience.
Equipment
The Eight-Inch Dobsonian as a First Instrument
Anselm Bauer spent a year handing the same 8-inch Dobsonian to seven first-time observers, then took the notes back to his garden in Munich.