Skywise Unlimited

The sky is divided into 88 parts. If you play connect-the-dots within these boundaries, some of the patterns resemble the names, but most were never meant to. Just like Washington State doesn’t look like George Washington. Click on the names below for a snarky review of the starlore of the constellations and the stuff we […]

The southern constellation of Tucana was named after a colorful South American bird in the late sixteenth century by Petrus Plancius. It is small but important. It contains some of our best examples of cosmic real estate, a dwarf galaxy and a globular cluster, both orbiting the Milky Way. Firstly, there’s the Small Magellanic Cloud. […]

There is a tiny constellation near the southern pole of the sky named Volans, the Flying Fish. Unfortunately there is no cute little story here about a fish getting its wish to have wings or such. The only story we have is that this part of the sky was named by some Dutch guy named […]

Meade Lightbridge Dobsonian Surrier Truss Telescopes A dobsonian telescope consists of optics which were designed by Isaac Newton in the 1660’s, on a mount popularized by John Dobson in the 1960’s. They say more than half of all amateur scopes are of this type and I believe it. Many people make their own, as I […]

The beaten path that the Sun appears to trod on its yearly trek among the stars is the oldest known method of mapping our way around the sky. So the Sun was the center of celestial attention even before people promoted it to admin of the solar system. That makes a lot of sense to […]