Latest Newsletter!
Monthly club newsletters are available for members to download. If you’re a member of CCAS, you’ll be able to download these newsletters to your computer.
Articles by admin
John Dobson
We lost one of the true giants of the amateur community on January 15, 2014. John Lowry Dobson was a popularizer of amateur astronomy. He is most notable for being the promoter of a design for a large, portable, low-cost Newtonian reflector telescope that bears his name, the Dobsonian telescope. [Read More…]
What’s Up for the December Sky
Key Stars For observers at mid-northern latitudes, the Pleiades star cluster is due south around 10 P.M. local time. Above it is Perseus, flanked by Auriga and Cassiopeia. Orion can be found above the southeastern horizon, and between it and the celestial pole glitters Capella. High in the east are [Read More…]
Black Holes, Solar Flares and Jupiter’s Lasers
On Saturday Oct 5th, 2013 at 10am Aurora Lipper gave an astronomical presentation at the SLO library to the general public entitled “Black Holes, Solar Flares, and Jupiter’s Lasers”. We had over 80 people join us on this bright sunny morning, Dave Majors, Joseph Carro, and Aurora Lipper amazed the [Read More…]
Constellation Photography by Lee Coombs
One of my earliest projects when I first started doing astrophotography was photographing all the Northern Hemisphere constellations. These early photos are still some of my most used photographs whenever I give talks yet were the easiest to take. With today’s modern films, one can record all the stars visible [Read More…]
Photographing the Sun by Lee Coombs
With an abundance of light, photographing the sun may seem like an extremely easy thing to do. It is this abundance of light, which includes harmful infrared and ultraviolet radiation, that presents the problems associated with solar photography. As kids, many of us experimented with a magnifying glass using it [Read More…]
Reflections of an Obsession by Tom Frey
Some of you probably don’t know me but I’m called Obsession #860, a truss tube Dobonian telelscope. My credentials include an18 inch f/4.5 Galaxy objective mirror with an enhanced coating and a JMI NGC MAX set of digital setting circles. I’m constructed of maple and red alder plywood. I pal [Read More…]