My Occultation Image was Nominated for Amateur Astronomy Photo of the Day!

I am thrilled to let you know that one of my Moon and Venus Occultation images from last week was selected as Today's Amateur Astronomy Photo of the Day, over at  AAPOD2.COM . 

It was a challenging event to capture. Clouds were rapidly rolling in front of the moon as the event progressed, and the moon was very faint in the daytime blue sky. The selected photo, which shows Venus emerging from the limb of the thin crescent moon with clouds in view was a sort of "happy accident" that occurred while I was experimenting with cropping and framing during the event itself. 

Anyway, a really great result. Stay tuned, another interesting announcement is coming soon...

The Occultation of the Moon and Venus with Clouds — AAPOD2.COM

The Occultation of the Moon and Jupiter on June 17, 2026.

 

This was an exceptionally challenging shoot. The moon was barely visible at a very thin crescent phase, with very bright skies and fast-moving clouds. I utilized my full astrophotography rig for this event - a William Optics 61mm refractor with ZWO ASI 2600MC Pro camera on my Celestron CGEM mount. Due to the speed of the clouds and the large number of them, I resorted mostly to screen caps to get what I could. However, the image above is a PNG captured straight from SharpCap. I thought it looked pretty nifty, so I'm posting it here.

By the way, an "occultation" is where, from a certain vantage point on Earth, one object passes in front of another. We were lucky to be at the right place given the event today, where the moon passed in front of Venus in the midafternoon hours. 

Images below show some more screen caps of the event.

HAM Radio and Astronomy

My humble radio shack, including an Icom IC-R75 receiver.

I've been getting more curious about space weather lately, and it led me down a rabbit hole I wasn't expecting: amateur radio. Specifically, a digital mode called FT8.

Here's the gist. Ham radio operators use FT8 to send tiny digital messages, basically just call signs and signal reports, across huge distances using really weak signals. To get from, say, Texas to Australia, those signals don't travel in a straight line. They bounce off the ionosphere, a charged layer way up in our atmosphere, skipping across it kind of like a stone skipping across a pond. Whether that bounce works, and how far the signal makes it, depends entirely on how charged that layer happens to be at that moment.

I've always been into radio communications, but what got me hooked on this is what happens next. Every time one of these contacts gets made, it gets logged to a public database that anyone can look at. With thousands of operators making contacts around the clock, you end up with a constantly updating, crowdsourced map of how the ionosphere is behaving across the whole planet. Scientists used to need a network of expensive ground stations to measure that. Now there's a global hobby doing it for free, just by people trying to talk to each other.

And that's where the astronomy connection clicked for me. The ionosphere isn't some independent thing, it's shaped almost entirely by the Sun. So everything the Sun does shows up there fast. A solar flare blasts out X-rays that supercharge the ionosphere for a few minutes, and ham operators see it immediately as their signals fade out or go weird, all from something that happened on the Sun eight minutes earlier. The 11-year solar cycle shows up too, as long stretches where certain frequencies just work better or worse. There's even a research project called HamSCI that's used ham radio data from the 2017, 2023, and 2024 eclipses to literally watch the ionosphere weaken as the Moon's shadow passes overhead, then bounce back once the sunlight returns.

It's a neat loop when you think about it: the Sun shapes the ionosphere, the ionosphere shapes how far a radio signal can travel, and a global network of hobbyists chasing weak signals for fun ends up mapping the whole process.

I actually got curious enough that I've started monitoring FT8 directly with my own shortwave radios, using the FT8TW app alongside PSK Reporter to see what I'm picking up and where it's coming from. It's been fun watching which stations show up on a given night and thinking about what that says about conditions overhead.

The PSK Reporter website view of some of my recent FT8 catches.

I even got Claude to help me build a little app to log my own FT8 detections, so I've got a running record I can look back on. I may throw this app up on Github for others to use, as other shortwave radio listeners have been curious about it, it seems.

Screenshots from the FT8 logging app I vibe-coded in Claude.

It's kind of amazing that a hobby built around saying hello to strangers has turned into an accidental solar observatory, and now I've got a front-row seat to it.

Taking a Smart Telescope from the US to Australia

This past May, I spent three weeks in Australia for family reasons. I was down in the southeast suburbs of Melbourne. My main reason for being there was to care for my ailing father, but I took my Dwarf3 telescope with me in case I had both a clear night and a chance for some respite. For the three weeks that I was there, I only had one clear night to work with, so made the most of it.

My Dwarf3 sitting on a well-lit Aussie football field.

I set up my scope up the road from my parents' house on an Aussie Rules football field. Interestingly, I used to take my first telescope, a 3" refractor, up to the spot many years ago as a teenager when I lived there. It's funny how modern tech can enable you to do interesting things like this - take a mobile observatory halfway around the world and take images of deep sky objects you explored many years ago as a teen.

I targeted three objects for the night. Firstly, Comet C/2025 R3 PANSTARRS. this was somewhat low over the horizon to my northwest, which placed it right in the middle of the massive light pollution being emanated from the city of Melbourne. Still, with short-ish exposures and some processing trickery, I was able to pull out the brighter part of the comet. Given its orbital path, I'd need to wait another 170,000 years to try again!

Comet C/2025 R3 PANSTARRS. 10x30 seconds @ Gain 60

Second target was the amazing Omega Centauri globular cluster. I still remember the first time I found this as a teen with my beginner refractor and how amazing it looked. Being able to image it and get this lovely result was just brilliant. The theory behind this cluster is that it is actually a remnant of a dwarf galaxy as evidence points to the existence of a black hole at its center. It's a stunning object both visually and photographically.

Omega Centauri. 200x15 seconds @ Gain 60

The third object I sough was the famed "Fighting Dragons of Ara" nebula, or NGC6188. this is an emission nebula that lies around 4,000 light years away. This was difficult with high-level clouds rolling in, but I'm happy with the result. I used the Dwarf's built-in DuoBand filter to pull out that hydrogen gas and darker dust lanes. This image is completely processed on my Samsung phone with the Dwarf app as well as Adobe Lightroom. I was really pleased to have been able to capture this interesting object. 

NGC1688. 200x15 seconds @ Gain 60

Again, how cool is it that we can now take this amazing smartscopes across the world and enjoy the hobby of astrophotography wherever we go?! I may be heading back to Australia later this year, and will have some additional targets to choose from if the weather cooperates.