About

Who keeps this, where, and why it is dark.

I’m Ewan. I’ve been looking at the sky properly since 2012, when a pair of binoculars and a borrowed copy of Turn Left at Orion got out of hand; the telescope followed two years later. I don’t take photographs. Everything here is what came through the eyepiece and into my eye, written down at the time and tidied up later.

The notebooks

Since the start I’ve kept a log on paper: A5 notebooks with plain pages, one entry per session, pencil because pens give up in the cold. There are eleven of them on the shelf now, some of them warped from dew and with the odd thumbprint of mud. The paper log is the real one and it isn’t going anywhere.

In autumn 2026 I started typing it up here, partly so it is backed up somewhere that isn’t a shelf, and partly because writing the notes out properly makes me read them again. So this site is new, but the sessions are dated by when they happened. I’m starting with nights I remember well and working backwards and forwards from them, which is why the list has gaps. It will fill in slowly.

Where

A field at the back of the house, in a village on the edge of the hills in the north of England, at about 54° north. It is not a truly dark site. There is a town glow low in the east and the village has a handful of streetlights, but the zenith on a good night reads around 21.2 on a sky meter and the Milky Way is obvious from late summer into winter. Good enough to keep me from driving anywhere.

The latitude shapes everything. From late May to late July the sky never gets properly dark, so the log goes quiet in high summer. In exchange, the long winter nights are very long indeed, and things like the Double Cluster never set.

Conventions

• Times are UTC, never local time.
• Seeing is on the Antoniadi scale, I (perfect) to V (awful). Transparency is my own rough score out of five.
• Sky brightness is an SQM reading at the zenith when I took one, otherwise a naked-eye limiting magnitude from star counts.
• Magnifications are for the 1200 mm Dobsonian unless I say otherwise. The kit is on the equipment page.

Why it is dark

Because I read it outside. If you are at the eyepiece, turn your screen brightness right down as well — this site was made to be read at the bottom of the brightness slider without wrecking your dark adaptation. It still costs you some. Paper is better.

Name

There is no mere, and only sometimes an owl. One sat on the gatepost through most of the session in the first notebook, and I wrote the name on the cover that night.