Backyard science

What a small telescope in Lisbon can measure: asteroids traced across a night, a comet signal found in a stack, an eclipse held still, and the reports that show the work.

These are observations made from Lisbon, most of them with a Seestar S50, and the analysis that follows each one. Every entry is a report: what was captured, what the measurements support, and, just as carefully, what they do not. A prediction from a catalogue is never counted as a detection, a pretty image is never used for photometry, and nothing here is a discovery claim.

The workflow behind it seals every raw frame by hash before analysis begins, keeps each science run isolated, and publishes only runs that passed a science and presentation review. The films and the phone-shaped pages under each report are the publications those runs produced.

The map at the bottom plots the nearest star systems to real coordinates.

22 Aug 2026M33: what one night supportsFifty-two minutes on the Triangulum Galaxy, 22 August 2026, and the tests that separate what the image shows from what the data proveM33, NGC 604, NGC 595, NGC 588, IC 132, IC 133 · Seestar S50
12 Aug 2026The partial solar eclipse of 12 August 2026, held stillEvery recorded frame matched to the JPL ephemeris, so the Sun stays fixed and the Moon crosses it: films from the raw frames and from the camera's own timelapse, and the Moon's map projected onto the recordingSun, Moon · Seestar S50
27 Jul 2026Three nights of moving objects25 to 28 July 2026: four known asteroids recovered where they were predicted, a comet signal found in a stack, another comet left uncertain, and six searches that found nothing(714) Ulula, (3) Juno, (18) Melpomene, 169P/NEAT, (397) Vienna, C/2024 J3 (ATLAS) · Seestar S50
25 Jul 2026What an edited photograph of Andromeda can and cannot proveAn audit of one 25 July 2026 image: exact pixel identity, a field-scale sky solution, 77 Gaia stars, and the claims that had to be withdrawnM31, M32, M110, NGC 206 · Seestar S50
25 Jul 2026(714) Ulula, from three exposures to the scale of PortugalA 41-kilometre asteroid caught crossing the Pleiades field on 25 July 2026, measured in three solved frames, placed on its orbit and set down over the map(714) Ulula, M45 · Seestar S50
17 Oct 2023Planets and the MoonThrough a Meade ETX90, with an iPhone XR held to the eyepieceMoon, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars · Meade ETX90 and an iPhone XR