How to See Comet Atlas in the March Sky

The first comet of 2020 will be visible in the later portion of March and into later spring. Comet Atlas is available to those who can find it. At its best viewing window relative to Earth in May, Comet Atlas will be a little over .2 AU from earth (1 AU is the distance between Sun and the Earth). 

Here is a diagram highlighting where to view the comet
in late March.

17-Passes 3 degrees from the galaxies Messier 81 and Messier 82.
29-Reaches its farthest point north, at less than 22 degrees from the North Celestial Pole, making the comet circumpolar north or latitude 22 degrees north (the northern half of Asia, and all of Europe and North America).
30-Passes into the constellation of Camelopardalis the Camel Leopard

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M42 Dazzles

Taken March 13th front yard in Pleasant Hill, CA

Shot with Celestron 8se telescope and ZWO asi camera

Birthday Moon - March 8, 2020

Birthday moon on March 8, 2020. This thing has orbited the earth
>400 times since I've been alive... hopefully will make it at least another
400+ orbits ; )

How to Autoguide for Astrophotography

Using autoguiding enables higher quality and longer exposure images of deep space objects like Nebulae. By aligning your telescope to a star using a guide camera and some software, the telescope with track whatever thing you're looking to image in the night sky. I have yet to perfect this craft as it requires some specific hardware (equatorial mount, guidescope, guiding camera, etc) that I either don't have or don't have setup correctly yet. Hey, its a learning process with the astrophotography stuff. 

I found a fantastic guide of how to prepare to autoguiding from Astrobackhard.com. 

Take a look if you're trying to setup autoguiding for astrophotography. 

If you're using celestron gear like myself (Nexstar 8se telescope), here is a great video tutorial to setup autoguding with the Nexstar series.