Equipment
Articles by Ade Ashford
Equipment
Equipment
Equipment
Equipment
Equipment
SharpStar D 150mm f/2.8 HNT: An imaging telescope with sharp vision
Until comparatively recently, your best tool for capturing wide-angle vistas of extended deep-sky objects with a full-frame DSLR or CCD/CMOS camera was a fast prime lens from one of the big-name players in photography. Now you can attain these swift imaging speeds with hyperbolic Newtonians, such as the SharpStar 15028HNT.
Observing
Seek out 1998 OR2, the brightest predicted near-Earth asteroid encounter of 2020
A near-Earth object (NEO) and potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) with the catchy official name of 52768 (1998 OR2) passes just 16.4 lunar distances (6.3 million kilometres) from Earth at 09:56 UT on Wednesday, 29 April 2020. Here’s our guide to locating this fascinating asteroid in 15-cm (6-inch) aperture telescopes and smaller from the UK this month.
Observing
See the waning crescent Moon meet the dawn planets, 15–16 April 2020
There’s a lot of planetary activity in the dawn sky in mid-April. If you’re an early riser in the British Isles, let the waning crescent Moon be your guide to the naked-eye planets Jupiter, Saturn and Mars on 15 and 16 April 2020. Typical 7×50 or 10×50 binoculars will show these attractive conjunctions well, while the smallest of telescopes also reveal some of Jupiter’s bright Galilean moons.
Observing
Don’t miss the largest supermoon of 2020 on 8 April
The full Moon of 8 April 2020 occurs just 8½ hours after perigee, its closest point to Earth in the oval-shaped lunar orbit. A full Moon occurring close to perigee is popularly called a supermoon, and this one will be 8½ percent larger than average. This is also the closest full Moon of the year and we’ll not see one larger until 5 November 2025.
Equipment