Section
An 8-inch Dobsonian compared, good binoculars for astronomy, a refractor's blue halo, an EQ mount for the home observer.
Equipment
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.
Equipment
Cosmo Tate spent a winter learning a sub-five-hundred-dollar dedicated astrocamera and reports honestly on what it does and does not deliver to the beginning imager.
Equipment
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.
Equipment
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.
Equipment
Cosmo Tate spent six months learning a small German equatorial mount in a Cambridge driveway, and reports on the experience for the observer who is considering one.
Equipment
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.
Equipment
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.
Equipment
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.