The Druid Circle

06/02/2026

T'O

06/02/2026

SR

06/01/2026

YOUNG PEOPLE! "The physics that makes the Sun look yellow from the ground is the same physics that makes the sky look blue. Both come from a single phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering, named after the British physicist John William Strutt, the third Baron Rayleigh, who worked out the equations in the 1870s and won the Nobel Prize in 1904 for his work in related areas. The two observations, blue sky and yellow Sun, are not separate facts. They are the same fact seen from two angles."

The Sun is depicted as yellow in children’s drawings, in weather icons, on flags, and in the standard astronomical shorthand. Astronomers themselves classify it as a “yellow dwarf,” a G2V-type main sequence star. The yellow framing is so consistent across human culture and science that it can ...

06/01/2026

06/01/2026

THIS MONTH'S NIGHT SKY! An apple (and a dumbell) a day keeps the doctor away. This is M27, also called the 'Dumbbell Nebula' or 'Apple Core Nebula'. It's a variety of what's known as a "Planetary Nebula". These types of nebulae are so named because early on when they were discovered, they appeared as very small 'disks' giving the appearance of a planet.
In actuality, these are stars that have exhausted the hydrogen in their cores at which point the star collapses and ejects the outer layers. This nebula is in the constellation Vulpecula (Little Fox) and sits at almost 1400 light years away.

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Geek Stuff:

Telescope/Lens - Celestron EdgeHD11 w/.7x focal reducer
Camera - QHY268C cooled to 14°f
Mount - Celestron CGX-L
Bortle Class 2 skies
Exposures: 81 x 120s
Filter - N/A
Acquisition software - APT 4.x
Processed in Pixinsight

05/30/2026

T'O 🙃