Travel

August 25, 2026

Every year, not long after our trip to Manitoba, and just before classes resume at Georgetown, I take a quick trip to the Atlantic Ocean coast in Delaware.

July 30, 2026

A sad reality of our time is that, across North America, summers are now accompanied by wildfire smoke. This July, the bulk of it came from northern Ontario...

July 15, 2026

Observing conditions in Washington, DC have been largely disappointing since last winter. Every time I stepped out with my Takahashi refractors, setting up with great anticipation...

August 24, 2025

For one week every year, I get to experience a truly dark sky – a 1 or at worst a 2 on the 9-level Bortle scale. At Riding Mountain National Park, near the western edge of Manitoba in the Canadian...

June 28, 2025

At around 10:00 PM on April 17th, I waited beside a railroad track that winds along the banks of the Susquehanna River in rural Pennsylvania. I had found a nook of open sky between trees and...

September 12, 2024

I haven't written much this year, owing in large part to my frantic quest to finish revising my next book,  Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean. Revising a book always makes you wonder why you decided to...

August 25, 2023

Recently, I've been on a mission to optimize my grab-and-go setup. Slowly but surely, parks that offered dark corners for a telescope have been saturated with bright lights: the kind that needlessly...

August 11, 2023

Last week, we made what used to be an annual pilgrimage to Riding Mountain National Park, a 3,000-kilometer expanse near the border of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Home to one of North America's...

August 3, 2023

To put it mildly, it's been a dreadful summer for astronomy in Washington, DC. The primary culprit is wildfire smoke, which seems to waft into the city with every clear night. As a professor whose...

August 26, 2021

Another clear night on the Atlantic Coast, again with good seeing (but mediocre transparency). Once again I quickly set up my EVScope, and this time I had eyes on the galaxies in the Big Dipper,...

August 25, 2021

It's been boiling hot and cloudy at night through much of July and August in DC, but this week we escaped to the Atlantic coast. I asked my five-year-old daughter which telescope I should bring, and...

July 27, 2020

This weekend, we travelled to the Shenandoah Mountains with our "bubble family" for a much-needed getaway from Washington, DC. It took a little negotiation - even a short trip with kids requires a...

December 27, 2019

Every Christmas, I head to Winnipeg with my family to visit my in-laws. It is painfully, mind-numbingly cold, and of course I miss my telescopes back home. Yet I've managed to cobble together some...

May 19, 2017

Astronomy equipment! How my wife swoons when I talk about it. Okay, that's a lie . . . but she does roll her eyes. And warns me not to get much more. So of course I have to write about what I've been...