One Year Later

Well, it has been one year of writing for this blog¹. I started last year as the COVID-19 pandemic began. I'd recently taken a more prominent role in the local West Hawaii Astronomy Club organizing the monthly meetings. As the pandemic began and we could no longer meet in person for our monthly meetings or for our monthly star parties. I wanted to encourage people to get out and observe on their own and send out observing reports to the club email list, so I started writing up short summaries of my observing sessions and posting them. I wanted those reports to have a more permanent home, so I decided to put them on a blog and here we are.

My first blog post "A Social Distancing Half Messier Marathon" was exactly one year ago. I'd hoped to make this one year post another messier marathon report, but sadly some weather moved in and wiped out most of the new moon period in March. Maunakea got snow and it took some time for the ice on the Keck domes to melt off shutting us down for a while. Once the storm cleared, I was on the schedule to do night support, so there was no chance for me to get out to observe for myself.

This blog has been mostly about my observing reports, but there have been articles on other topics as well. For example, the appearance of Comet NEOWISE back in July gave me a chance to talk about some of my nightscape photography and time lapses:

• 2020 July 18
• 2020 July 19
• 2020 July 21
• 2020 July 24

Later, I had the opportunity to appear on the Space Junk podcast and write about that (2021 Feb 01). Finally, I got to showcase more nightscape and time lapse photography thanks to the new eruption at Kilauea Volcano when the Halema'uma'u crater opened up again (2021 Feb 07).

I've got some more content which I'm planning for this blog. The biggest component of which will be a series of articles documenting my trials and tribulations as I try to build a backyard observatory. I hope to break ground on that project very soon and I've got several articles on the planning and design that I'd like to write as well as articles documenting various stages of the build (assuming all goes well). Look for the first of those over the coming weeks and months.