NGC 7000 is more commonly called the the North America Nebula. It gets its nickname from its coincidental resemblance to our continent—if you squint and pretend a little, you can see Mexico and Central America to the right, and the Gulf of Mexico and Florida center-right. The nebula is a glowing cloud of hydrogen gas…

City of sin … My new school is about three miles from the ocean, but since it’s the Boston area, the drive takes 20 minutes, 30 with traffic. Yesterday, I was stuck at school for a meeting that would happen later in the evening. Since I couldn’t go anywhere til then, I headed over to…

My Kingdom for a Chair Cuttyhunk Island sits off the coast of Massachusetts 12 miles south of New Bedford and about 8 miles northwest of Martha’s Vineyard, part of the Elizabeth Islands chain. I didn’t know much about Cuttyhunk, other than it was “undeveloped” as Cape islands go, and tiny. I did learn that the…

I recently purchased the Dwarf 3 telescope, which is designed to make astrophotography more accessible to those of us who don’t like spending six hours outside in the dark, fumbling with equipment that we can’t afford and don’t have the patience to learn how to use. Based on my first three deep sky images, I…

This is the first post in my new photo blog, which I hope I’ll keep revising. That’s my grandson, taking the train with his dad and me. The original destination was Boston, but we stopped halfway there to get ice cream. It gave us about 45 minutes to walk around the town of Winchester a…