Mr. Yoshida's telescope ranking

Here's the site in Japanese. Over at CloudyNights.com is a translation and some observations in this thread.

Between my astro-buddies and myself, we have quite a few of the scopes listed in his rankings. We also have scopes that are not listed. I wish we could fly Mr. Yoshida to Texas so he could look through what's missing from his list. I would love to learn what criteria he uses and what steps he follows to determine the rankings.

I'm betting that the larger aperture TEC scopes would land pretty high up on the list. I've had the privilege of looking through the TEC160FL, TEC180FL, and TEC200FL. Personally, I would love to own any of those, or even the ED version of the 160 and/or the 200 (sadly, the 200ED is no longer made). I would also like to see more BORG scopes on his list.

APOD - Dec 9, 2008

Having neglected the blog for a while, I decided to revive it with my lucky day. One of my recent images was NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day on December 9. I am deeply honored. Below is the image as formatted by the APOD editors:



Details can be viewed here on my website (VisualUniverse.org).

IC 1396 Elephant Trunk Nebula

Last month, I was able to image this from the Eldorado Star Party in south Texas. The combination of emission and dark nebulae make for a dramatic structure. This is a popular object to image. Hope I did it justice.

Incredible image of Jupiter

Geez...does this guy have his C14 in orbit? This image is incredible. See the detail on Io? Celestron should be running ads with this guy's images.

Andy's vid

Andy committed the act of copycat and chose to go with Viddler.com as well. He used a fisheye lens for his captures. This one is my fav:

So much for YouTube...

I found my uploads to YouTube became corrupt and the resolution was quite horrid. Both Veoh.com and Viddler.com seem to do much better on resolution. I uploaded the same .wmv video to both sites. Let me know which one you like best:


Watch Telescopes Tracking in Game Videos  |  View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

ESP 2008 video

** video removed due to YouTube compression mechanism totally ruining the video **


Eldorado Star Party at night. I shot this with a Canon EOS and remote timer.