Night Skies
Tracking Lunar Libration Across One Synodic Month
The slow wobble of the Moon, observed and sketched over twenty-nine and a half nights from a balcony in Trieste.
Meteors & solar editor
Iolanda Ferro
Iolanda Ferro is an amateur solar observer with a small private observatory in the hills above Naples. She edits Last Light's Meteors and Solar sections.
Beats
Published in Last Light
Meteors
Radio Meteor Detection at Home
Iolanda Ferro describes the surprisingly accessible practice of detecting meteors by their radio reflections — a technique that works in cloud, in daylight, and through the worst light pollution.
Equipment
The Eyepiece Collection That Actually Gets Used
Iolanda Ferro examines her own eyepiece case after twenty-two years of amateur observing and finds that she uses four of the eleven eyepieces inside it.
History
Williamina Fleming and the Pickering Computers
Hired as Edward Pickering's housekeeper in 1879, Williamina Fleming became, by 1898, the curator of astronomical photographs at Harvard and a discoverer of the Horsehead Nebula.
Solar
The Sunspot Drawers of Locarno: Ninety Years of a Daily Record
At the Specola Solare Ticinese above Locarno, observers have drawn the Sun's surface by hand on most clear days since 1957. Iolanda Ferro on what the practice preserves.
Dark Sites
Norwich, Vermont: the town that zoned its sky
In 2019 a town of 3,400 in the upper Connecticut River valley quietly adopted one of the most stringent municipal dark-sky ordinances in the United States. Seven years on, the planning office reports back.
Night Skies
The Planets Visible Tonight from a Mid-Northern Latitude
A short field guide to the five naked-eye planets as they appear in the late spring sky from forty degrees north.
Equipment
Good Binoculars for Astronomy: A Careful Comparison
Iolanda Ferro tested six pairs of binoculars across a Neapolitan winter, from a thirty-euro Bushnell to a fifteen-hundred-euro Nikon, and reports what the eye actually saw.
Meteors
Perseids Prep at the Kitchen Table
Iolanda Ferro walks the home observer through the small decisions — chair, blanket, chart, timing — that make the August Perseid maximum worth the lost sleep.
Solar
White Light on a 60mm: What a Small Refractor Will Show You
A modest 60mm refractor, properly filtered, will draw a sunspot group with surprising honesty. Iolanda Ferro on a year of daytime observing from a balcony in Naples.