A Spoke-tacular Observation

It happens perhaps once or twice a year – if you’re lucky. The seeing is exceptional, coming in at a solid 8 or 9 out of 10, the planet’s image on the laptop screen offering glimpses of details normally seen in the post‑processing sharpening.

The morning of August 26th turned out to be just such a blessing. The near‑full Moon illuminated high, thin clouds covering about half the sky, but Saturn was unencumbered by them and shone steadily from its pocket of unusually calm air. The video stream of the planet featured a Cassini Division that looked like it had been cut with a razor. The southern hemisphere displayed its finely shaded band structure, and even the C‑ring seemed to pop in and out of view. I eagerly began my captures – one never knows how long good fortune will last.

After a couple of completed videos I did a quick stack of one. I was immediately drawn to a shadowy smear on the following (eastern) ansa of Saturn’s B‑ring. Could it be a spoke?

Spokes are among the most fascinating phenomena in Saturn’s ring system. They look like shadows or smudges dabbed onto the rings, but they’re not shadows at all – they’re ring material suspended above the ring plane. And they’re quite transient: appearing, fading, shifting, and reappearing over timescales of minutes to hours.

What are these strange, ephemeral markings? Our current research – initiated by Voyager, supplemented by Cassini, yet still evolving – is that spokes are made of micron‑scale icy dust grains that have been electrically charged. When conditions are right, these charged particles can be lifted slightly above the ring plane, forming streaks that appear dark or bright depending on illumination geometry.

The charging mechanism seems tied to the solar wind interacting with Saturn’s magnetic field. When the solar wind is strong or variable, it can disturb the planet’s magnetosphere in ways that promote dust charging. Once charged, the particles respond to electromagnetic forces rather than purely gravitational ones, allowing them to levitate and drift.

Spokes are also seasonal. They become most common and most prominent near Saturn’s equinoxes, when the Sun’s angle on the rings is shallow and the solar wind’s influence on the magnetosphere is more direct. We are definitely in “spoke season,” since Saturn reached its autumnal equinox about fifteen months ago, and the ALPO is receiving multiple observations from advanced amateur imagers.

The extraordinary seeing did not last more than about half an hour, gradually falling back to average over the two and a half hours that I imaged. After a recovery nap, I set about processing the videos. To my great delight, it was quite clear – especially in an animation of the IR captures taken early in the session – that I had indeed documented a spoke as a dark radial feature in that eastern ansa. It lasted long enough to survive derotation and stacking, showing as a distinct dusky streak cutting across the otherwise uniform brightness of the B‑ring.

Animation of spoke movement on
left ansa over 15-minute period

Catching a spoke feels a bit like winning the lottery – witnessing something subtle and strange, something that Voyager first hinted at and Cassini explored in depth. They remind us that Saturn’s rings are not static but rather a dynamic, electrically active, constantly shifting system influenced by magnetism, sunlight, plasma, and dust. They epitomize the reason I’ll set the alarm for 2 a.m. and set up the telescope in hopes of snaring the unusual – and in doing so, contributing in some small way to planetary science.

A Name Among the Minor Planets

Astronomy has a way of giving us moments that stop us in our tracks — a perfect opposition, a night under Bortle‑2 skies, a comet that arrives unannounced. This summer brought one of those moments for me, though of a very different kind: at the behest of my friend Rik Hill, the International Astronomical Union officially named minor planet (45639) Tomney in my honor.

It’s difficult to write about something like this without feeling self‑conscious. The night sky has always been the real reward – from that 60mm Monolux that first showed me the Moon’s craters, to the RV‑6 that carried me through my early planetary adventures, to the more recent years of imaging the planets with modern tools. My journey has never been about recognition; it has been about curiosity, community, and the quiet satisfaction of contributing something useful to a hobby that has given me so much.

Still, when I learned of the naming, I felt a deep and genuine gratitude. The citation in a way validates my work modernizing ALPO’s digital presence and preserving tens of thousands of observations – efforts that began in earnest over six years ago during the pandemic years, when the silver lining of remote work gave me the ability to take the reins of the ALPO gallery to transform it into a repository rather than a scrapbook of interesting photos. And given my nature that then grew into a much needed full redesign of the ALPO website which today has advanced search functionality of more than 45,000 observations. Like pulling a thread this has subsequently led to championing an ALPO SPLICE training initiative to help our members increase the quality of their images and thereby the value of the repository. All represent labors of love, shaped by decades of learning, tinkering, and a passion born in a young grade-school boy all the way back in the 60's under those early Towson’s skies.

The naming of a minor planet is not a finish line. It’s a reminder – that amateur astronomy thrives when people choose to show up, to share, to teach, to preserve, and to build. I’ve been fortunate to do those things alongside generous friends, dedicated observers, and welcoming organizations like HAL and ALPO. If my name now circles the Sun, it does so as a symbol of that shared effort.

As for me, I’ll hopefully keep doing what I’ve always done: chasing the planets from the driveway, coaxing deep sky images from the Vixen, helping new observers find their footing, and working to ensure that what I've helped build today will still be useful and maintainable for tomorrow’s amateurs and researchers.

Carpe Noctem!

Binocular Blessings

Every summer I’m reminded that amateur astronomy doesn’t have to begin with a telescope. In fact, some of my fondest observing memories come from evenings years ago from family vacations in Maine. The boys were young and after they were tucked in for the night, I’d slip out to the porch overlooking the lake and settle into a chair. The ambience was peaceful and calm, punctuated by the occasional splash from a small mouth bass or haunting loon call. The Milky Way hung above the lake in the east with a view that spoke of God’s majesty. With nothing more than a pair of 7×50 binoculars that I had packed, I’d sweep those summer celestial vistas – clusters , nebulae, even a few galaxies – and feel the quiet satisfaction of discovering the sky one small field at a time.

Why Binoculars Work So Well for Beginners

Although I was hardly a beginning amateur astronomer in those days, until that time I really did not have the appreciation of their worth. Binoculars are instant astronomy. No alignment. No cooldown. No setup. You step outside and you’re observing.

They also match how we naturally use our eyes – both open, scanning, comparing, noticing patterns. The wide field of view makes the sky feel familiar rather than intimidating. You’re not hunting for tiny objects in a narrow eyepiece; you’re exploring.

And they’re affordable. A perfectly serviceable 7×50 like the Celestron Cometron runs around $50, while more serious observers can step up to something like the SkyMaster Pro ED with BaK‑4 prisms and ED glass. Either way, you’re spending far less than even an entry‑level telescope.

But the real magic is what you can see.

A Backyard Night Under Bortle 8 Skies

As part of my research on how well binoculars can work for an observer wrestling with light pollution, I spent a late June evening in my Towson backyard – a Bortle 8 environment with porch lights, trees, and a limiting naked‑eye magnitude around 4.25. Hardly pristine. But – could my trusty 7x50 binoculars still show me some of the celestial showpieces?

From my observing notes:

“Started off with some double stars… Alberio is quite hard to discern… but a better one is that double near the blinking planetary of Cygnus… the brighter one definitely appears to have an orangish tint… the secondary is white, perhaps a slight bluish tint.”

Even in suburban light, color contrast doubles pop beautifully. The Cygnus 30–31 pair — one orange supergiant, one white‑blue giant — is especially rewarding.

“Moving on to the double‑double in Lyra… very easy and clean to split… equal in magnitude and color, whiteness, with brilliant Vega in the field.”

Epsilon Lyrae is a perfect binocular target: bright, easy to find, and visually striking.

A little after midnight, the deep‑sky objects began to reveal themselves:

“Using the 7×50s for M13… you can definitely see two stars and a chubby little cloud… doable with the 7×50s, but in the 15×70s it is quite apparent and easy.”

“Following the tail of Aquila… M11 can be discerned as a tiny fuzzy patch… and again, far more apparent in the 15×70s.”

“Broche’s Cluster… the 15×70s picked it up readily… in the 7×50s you can definitely make out the coathanger asterism.”

“Above the teapot… M8… a fuzzy something in the 7×50s, more distinct in the 15×70s.”

These are exactly the kinds of objects that reward beginners: bright clusters, colorful doubles, recognizable asterisms, and nebulae that appear as soft glows rather than faint whispers.

Sharing the Views

A few nights after that backyard session, I brought my 15×70 Oberwerk binoculars to the HAL public star party and set them up on a mount so visitors could enjoy a steady view. It turned into one of the most rewarding outreach evenings I’ve had in a while. People were genuinely surprised at what a simple pair of binoculars could do – the Moon’s craters sharp and bright, Epsilon Lyrae cleanly split into its twin “headlights,” and M13 hanging there as a distant, ancient ball of unresolved starlight. Many had never looked through binoculars for astronomy before, and seeing their reactions – that mix of delight and amazement – was a reminder of how powerful these simple instruments can be for opening the sky to newcomers.

Binoculars offer something telescopes often don’t: confidence. You learn the sky faster. You recognize patterns. You begin to understand how objects relate to one another. And you get immediate success – something every beginner needs. Even for us veteran star gazers, an evening in the lounge chair with a pair of binoculars to scan the sky makes observing less of a technical challenge and more of a simple pleasure.

I still think back to that Maine porch experience, spending hours with a simple pair of binoculars discovering the summer sky one field at a time, being surprised at just how much I could pick out from that dark sky. My hope is that more folks could discover the heavens, and binoculars are one of the best ways I know of to begin that journey.

A Jovian Superfecta

Earlier this month I was hoping to get in another imaging session for the current Jupiter apparition, with the planet still standing relatively high as the May twilight deepened. I started in “White Light” (color) and quickly saw that the Great Red Spot (GRS) was rising and so I’d have it well positioned. The seeing however, was definitely sub-par, probably a 3 (maybe a 2?) out of 10.

Yet even under this mediocre seeing, it occurred to me that this was an opportunity to try for a wavelength superfecta, capturing the planet and its iconic storm in four different lights: WL, Infrared (IR), Methane (CH4) (UV), and Ultraviolet. It was a little challenging due to the low transmission I get in the CH4 and UV bands, causing the frames-per-second to drop dramatically. In such situations I leverage 2×2 binning, which groups four pixels into one. That makes the target effectively brighter, boosting the signal through this very dark filter. But it also reduces the image scale, so Jupiter appears slightly smaller and less detailed than in my unbinned captures.

The result was an interesting mosaic showcasing how Jupiter presents a different and scientifically valuable appearance in these varying bands of light. Each wavelength highlights a different altitude, particle size, or scattering process in the Jovian atmosphere. The GRS, being a deep, long‑lived anticyclone with complex vertical structure, becomes a perfect case study.

White Light

White light is the “baseline Jupiter”, the view closest to what the eye sees. It is a blend of scattering from cloud tops and deeper layers. The GRS’s color comes from chromophores (complex molecules produced by photochemistry) concentrated in its upper haze.

• The GRS appears as a salmon‑colored oval embedded in the South Equatorial Belt.
• Contrast is moderate because white light integrates photons from many atmospheric layers.

Ultraviolet (UV)

UV images emphasize high‑altitude hazes and aerosols. UV absorption is dominated by photochemical hazes. The GRS has a thick, vertically extended haze cap that blocks UV, making it stand out as a dark feature.

• The GRS typically appears dark in UV because its upper haze absorbs strongly at short wavelengths.
• Surrounding high-altitude haze regions appear bright.
• The UV view often looks “sharper” because it isolates the uppermost layers.

Infrared

Near‑IR wavelengths penetrate deeper into the cloud deck. IR brightness correlates with cloud-top altitude and temperature. The GRS’s anticyclonic upwelling lifts ammonia clouds to higher, colder levels, making it a strong IR reflector.

• The GRS often appears bright in IR because its cloud tops are higher and colder than surrounding regions.
• Belts and zones invert their contrast relative to visible light.
• Even though seeing is often steadier in IR, on this particular night it was not a huge help with poor conditions.

Methane Band

The methane absorption band is the most altitude‑selective of the four. Methane imaging isolates the highest cloud layers, with low-altitude features vanishing almost completely. The GRS’s brightness confirms its vertical extent and the strong upwelling at its center.

• Bright areas in CH₄ indicate very high-altitude clouds that reflect sunlight before it can be absorbed by methane.
• The GRS is usually bright in methane band because its cloud tops extend high into the upper troposphere.
• If you look closely you can also make out tiny NN-LRS-1 near the same longitude of the GRS but in the Northern Polar Region of the planet.

The GRS changes appearance because each wavelength samples a different combination of scattering, absorption, and cloud height. The storm’s vertical structure is complex: a tall central canopy, deep roots, and a surrounding turbulent wake. Multi‑wavelength imaging is one of the few ways amateurs can probe that structure directly.

If you’ve never tried imaging Jupiter beyond one-shot color, you may want to consider expanding your armamentarium to include some additional filters. I’d start off with an IR as it is the easiest and also has the advantage of being a mild antidote to poor seeing. Later on adding a simple UV or methane filter can expand your imaging opportunities of the planet and provide additional valuable scientific information. Jupiter rewards curiosity – and it rewards imagers who look at it in more than one light.

More Than Pretty Pictures

Five years ago, when I first took over posting gallery submissions, the ALPO’s Digital Section was still operating much as it had for decades: images came in, were displayed, and had little consistency in terms of meeting basic guidelines that would capture useful information about the image. Certainly useful, but not easily searchable, and not structured in a way that supported scientific work. That was the moment I began the long process of indexing every Solar and planetary submission, extracting timestamps, system longitudes, filters, and feature tags. The goal was simple: turn the gallery into a true image repository.

Today, with more than 40,000 indexed images and sketches, that transformation is finally visible. And this year’s Jupiter Pro–Am collaboration tied to JWST and Juno’s Perijove 81 proved its value. Because the gallery is now searchable, we were able to provide the research team with rapid ground‑based context during a very narrow observing window. That is exactly what “from stargazing to science” should mean — not a slogan, but a capability.

But the strength of the repository depends entirely on the quality of the observations our members submit. And with nearly 95% of modern contributions coming from imagers, we need to ensure that members feel confident producing clean, scientifically useful data.

That is why we are launching the SPLICE Mentoring Program this summer.

SPLICE — Solar, Planetary, and Lunar Imaging with Computer Enhancement — reflects the modern workflow of high‑resolution imaging far better than the old “lucky imaging” label. The process is systematic: capture, rank, align, stack, sharpen. Don Parker demonstrated this long before digital sensors were common, and his legacy forms the backbone of the SPLICE approach.

The mentoring program is designed for ALPO members who are new to imaging or looking to refine their technique. Participants can work with ALPO‑provided sample videos or with their own data, learning to use accessible open‑source tools to produce scientifically valuable results. The goal is not just a prettier picture — it’s a contribution that strengthens the long‑term archive.

Because this is a one‑on‑one program, we will begin modestly with one to two mentoring sessions per month. My hope is that experienced ALPO imagers will step forward as additional mentors so we can expand capacity over time.

Revitalizing the ALPO will come from building confidence, strengthening community, and helping observers feel that their work matters. The SPLICE Mentoring Program is one more step toward making “from stargazing to science” a reality, and ensuring that the next 40,000 images are even more valuable than the first.

The Beauty of M35

Winter’s sky offers no shortage of showpieces, and for me Messier 35, the bright open cluster resting at the foot of Castor in Gemini, is one of those that I have to check in on. M35 has long been one of my favorite winter targets. It’s easy to find, bright enough to pop even from suburban skies, and rich enough to reward everything from binocular sweeps to deep imaging sessions.

Through binoculars or a small telescope, the cluster spills across the field as a loose spray of mostly white stars, though attentive observers will notice a few with a soft yellowish tint. It is an easy star hop at the base of the constellation, from 3^rd magnitude m and h out to Gem 1 (Propus). Once there our target is only a degree to the north. If you have dark skies (or a large enough scope) you are in for a double treat as just southwest of M35 lies the much fainter and more compact NGC 2158. Under suburban skies it often hides in the background glow, but from darker locations it resolves into a tiny, grainy knot resembling a globular cluster. This side-kick is a distant, older cluster five times farther away than M35 itself. I still remember the first time I caught it from a friend’s property in western Maryland’s dark countryside. Ever since, it’s been a personal benchmark for a dark sky.

This year, with Jupiter entering Gemini, I had hoped for a reprise of one of my favorite celestial pairings. M35 sits only a couple of degrees north of the ecliptic, and when Jupiter wanders through the constellation the giant planet can glide surprisingly close to the cluster. One such moment came in the spring of 1990, when Jupiter passed less than a degree south of M35 – a striking sight in a low‑power eyepiece of my 6” RV-6, creating a memory that stays with you for decades.

With a clear and not bitterly-cold January night unfolding, and with my HEM27 mount freshly repaired, I decided to test the repair as well as my plate-solving technique by targeting M35. After a quick polar alignment, I asked NINA to plate‑solve for M35 and – to my great delight – it did so flawlessly, undoubtably saving me time. As the first 15 second frame came in using the ASI2600MC I could make out not only M35 but that NCG 2158 was well within the frame. I kicked off a capture loop and checked in every 15 minutes or so to ensure things were still moving smoothly.

I ended up capturing 325 frames at 15 seconds each, and after tossing the outliers, 284 made it into the final integration. Processing the data in PixInsight was its own adventure. I leaned on Copilot for guidance, with mixed results – some guidance was helpful, others sent me wandering down dead ends or into outdated interface paths. But persistence paid off. After working through using the Weighted Batch Pre-processing (WBPP) script I ended up with a final image that I’m genuinely pleased with. The slight variety of colors in bright and showy M35 are seen and little NGC 2158 is fainter and yellower, reflecting its age and distance.

M35 never disappoints. Whether you’re sweeping with binoculars, hunting for NGC 2158 from a dark site, or capturing hundreds of frames through a modern imaging setup, it’s a reminder of how much beauty sits quietly in the winter sky, waiting for us to look up.

An All-Nighter with Jove

I always look forward to Jupiter oppositions in the winter zodiac. The current apparition has the giant planet hosted among the stars of Gemini, riding about as high as possible in the night sky for mid‑northern observers. The combination of it gliding above the worst of the turbulent atmospheric and long January nights (where in theory you might capture an entire rotation in a single session) are exciting prospects.

But winter is winter - especially in the Baltimore area. The cold is one thing to contend with, but even more of a spoiler are the clouds and unstable seeing. I’ve often felt that our region’s winter skies offer fewer usable nights than any other season, and it turns out that impression isn’t just grumbling. According to long‑term climatology, the region’s winter sky is overcast or mostly cloudy about half the time. And while I cannot find data on “seeing” I would bet we get most clear nights checking in at a 1-2 seeing level on the scale of 1-10.

Which is why the night of January 7–8, 2026 felt like such a small miracle.

The forecast from Astrospheric earlier that day told the usual winter story: cloud cover and seeing models leaning pessimistic, barely reaching “acceptable” levels. The kind of forecast that normally has me planning a short session – an hour, maybe ninety minutes – before the clouds roll in or the seeing collapses (or the cold gets the best of me). But heck, why not roll the dice? After all, Jupiter was a couple days from opposition, so prime time.

When I stepped outside around 8:30 PM, the first surprise was the temperature. It wasn’t bitterly cold, which meant I could stay chair‑side instead of retreating indoors between captures. I’d already set the scope out earlier to cool so I started my “pre-flight checklist”

• Confirm the spotting scope alignment
• Dial in a very solid collimation
• Check transparency (a respectable 7–8 by my estimate)
• Gauge the seeing (somewhere between 3 and 5, with brief moments of better steadiness)

With the QHY camera running through SharpCap, I was getting a very respectable 130+ fps in white light. I began a cadence of four‑run sequences every 15–20 minutes, each run a two‑minute capture. Europa was approaching the disk, with a transit predicted just after midnight – another incentive to keep going as long as the sky allowed.

And, surprisingly, the sky did cooperate. As I wrapped up each imaging run I was like a gambler pushing his luck, thinking “just one more capture before you call it quits”. Before I knew it, it was midnight and I had seen about half a Jupiter rotation at this point. Now my appetite was whetted for that elusive full rotation capture. I did some quick calculations in my head and figured I’d have to hang in there until close to 4 a.m. in order to see the GRS, which had started off setting, come back into view. I decided to go for it and did a meridian flip to ensure I could track the giant planet as it headed west in the sky.

I continued performing imaging captures but now roughly every 30-60 minutes, retreating inside between them not so much to warm up but to put my feet up and get a little rest. The days of staying up all night and at my scope may well be behind me!

By 3 a.m. I could see that some patchy clouds were finally working their way into my region, dropping the transparency a bit. About an hour later the Moon showed a bit of a halo around it, further evidence of deteriorating conditions. And while that sort of haze is not always a killer for seeing, in this instance I could see that it, too, was slipping as the early morning wore on. I took the final sequence at from 4:15–4:30 a.m. with the seeing slipping down to about a 3. But I had it – there was the GRS rising into view signaling I had seen the full planet’s cloud features pass in front of me.  

Despite the uneven seeing in the early morning hours, the dataset was strong enough to build a full cylindrical map in WinJUPOS. The region around the GRS is a little darker than ideal, but that’s simply the geometry of the night: I never caught it near the central meridian, so the limb‑darkened frames had to carry that section. Still, the map is a personal accomplishment that captures the character of Jupiter beautifully for that date, revealing many long-term features such as the GRS, Oval BA, the SSTB storms, and many others!

Yes, nights like that are rare in January. The forecasts don’t encourage you. The statistics don’t encourage you. And yet, every so often, the sky relents just enough to reward persistence. My reward on this night was a nearly full rotation, a Europa transit, some enjoyable visual observing of the planet between imaging runs, and a cool map documenting Jupiter as it came to opposition in 2026. Yep - if this is how my 2026 observing is going to go, I’ll take it!