All Articles
25 articles, most recent first. Every article is authored by Dmitry Shteynbuk from Miami, Florida.
Learning the Sky: Five Constellations That Anchor Everything
A stepwise plan for actually learning the night sky. Start with five anchor constellations and use them to find everything else — season by season.
Magnitude: How Astronomers Measure Brightness
The logarithmic magnitude scale — why lower numbers mean brighter, what the actual math is, and how to use it under real sky conditions.
The Celestial Sphere: How the Sky Is Organized
The imaginary sphere astronomers use to describe positions in the sky — poles, equator, ecliptic, and coordinates — explained in plain language.
Comets, Asteroids, and Meteors: What's the Difference?
Three small-body categories that get confused constantly, with clear definitions and the real numbers on size, orbit, and composition.
The Moon's Phases, Finally Explained Properly
The phases of the Moon are pure geometry: the Sun lights one hemisphere, and we see how much of that hemisphere from a different angle each night.
Why Orbits Work: Kepler's Three Laws in Plain Language
The three laws that describe every orbit in the solar system — stated in words, backed with real numbers for the planets, and grounded in Newton's gravity.
How Stars Die: White Dwarfs, Neutron Stars, and Black Holes
A star's endpoint is set almost entirely by its birth mass. Three different endings, three different physical regimes, one clear rule.
The HR Diagram: The Single Most Useful Chart in Astronomy
The Hertzsprung–Russell diagram plots stars by luminosity and temperature. Nearly every question in stellar astronomy starts here.
How a Star Is Born
Star formation from cold molecular cloud to protostar to hydrogen fusion — the physics, the timescales, and the real objects you can point a telescope at.
How Far Is Far: The Cosmic Distance Ladder
Astronomers measure distance in overlapping steps, each calibrated by the one below. Six rungs take us from the solar system to the edge of the observable universe.
Nebulae: The Four Kinds and How to See Them
Emission, reflection, dark, and planetary nebulae — what makes each one glow (or not), and the best-known example of each you can actually observe.
The Milky Way: Reading Our Own Galaxy from Inside It
What we've been able to work out about the Milky Way's size, shape, and structure while stuck inside it — and how to read the summer sky as a slice through its disk.
Eyepieces and Focal Ratio: The Math That Sets Your View
Three numbers determine what you see through any telescope: focal length, focal ratio, and eyepiece focal length. The relationships are simple — and they explain almost every eyepiece choice.
Tropical Observing: Humidity, Haze, Hurricane Season, and the Surprisingly Steady Seeing of South Florida
South Florida is humid and thunderstorm-prone but delivers genuinely steady planetary seeing and a long dry season. How to plan around it.
Your First Telescope: Why Aperture Beats Magnification
The single most important spec is aperture — and the second is a mount you don't hate. Every other consideration is downstream of those two.
Refractor vs. Reflector vs. Catadioptric: Optics, Honestly Compared
The three optical designs that dominate amateur astronomy — how each one works, what it's genuinely good at, and where the trade-offs actually bite.
Stacking: How Amateurs Beat Light Pollution with Math
One 10-minute exposure and one hundred 6-second exposures are not equivalent — but they're close. Here's how image stacking multiplies your signal without multiplying the noise.
Tracking the Sky: Why Equatorial Mounts Exist
The sky rotates. Your camera doesn't. An equatorial mount is the geometric trick that lets a single motor cancel out that rotation for hours at a time.
Astrophotography with What You Have: Phone and Tripod
Modern smartphones can capture the Milky Way, meteor showers, and star trails. The whole trick is holding the camera still and knowing which manual settings actually matter.
Hubble, Leavitt, and the Night the Universe Got Bigger
In 1912 Henrietta Leavitt found a rule that let astronomers measure vast cosmic distances. A dozen years later, Edwin Hubble used it to prove other galaxies existed.
Galileo's Telescope: Four Moons That Changed Everything
In one winter of 1609–1610, a Paduan mathematician turned a toy Dutch spyglass on the sky and discovered enough to break the Aristotelian universe.
Ptolemy to Copernicus: Moving the Center of the Universe
For 1,400 years the Earth sat at the center of the cosmos. It took a Polish canon in 1543 to move it — and even he did it with reservations.
The Southern Sky at 25°N: Stars Miami Sees That the North Never Does
From latitude 25.8° N, a strip of the southern sky invisible to most of the continental U.S. rises comfortably above the horizon. Here's what to look for.
Dark-Sky Sites Near Miami: The Everglades, Big Cypress, and the Keys
Miami itself is Bortle 8 — but a 90-minute drive west drops you into some of the darkest skies east of the Mississippi. Where to go, and what to bring.
Watching Cape Canaveral Launches from Miami: What You Can See and When
Miami is 340 km south of Cape Canaveral — close enough that the right launches are visible. What to look for, when, and how to spot it.