Sunshine Nate’s Frequently Asked Questions.

General FAQs

  • Pennsylvania, USA, Planet Earth.

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  • We’ve created a telescope buyer’s guide with lots of information. Click here to check it out.

    There is one cardinal rule for purchasing a telescope: The best telescope for you is the one you will USE! Dobsonian telescopes, like the one I use, are easy to transport and setup and you can find them in very portable table-top designs. When considering your first scope, make sure you keep the following in mind:

    • Try before you buy! Local astronomy clubs can be a great resource for first-time telescope buyers. Amateur astronomers are usually friendly and knowledgeable and willing to share views through their scopes. You can look up local astronomy clubs at Sky & Telescope.

    • Avoid cheap telescopes at big box stores around the holidays! These package deals often tout things like lots of extra accessories, smartphone apps, and show Hubble photos on the box. These are almost always made of cheap materials and are underpowered.

    • Avoid the extremes! Scopes with big mirrors will have great views but are often heavy and difficult to transport. Astrophotography telescopes can capture great images if configured correctly, but they’re expensive and have a huge learning curve.

    • Consider buying used! Astronomers are always upgrading their gear. Check local resources like astronomy clubs or Facebook Marketplace for used telescopes before you buy new. As always, make sure you don’t pay for anything before you have seen it in person and can take it home.

    • Where can I buy online? There are several good places online for telescopes and astronomy gear.

  • The main telescope is an Orion XT8 Dobsonian. This is the one I use with Tridapter (see link under “How do you show the Moon” section) and phone mounted to the eyepiece to show planets. It is a reflecting telescope, meaning it uses a primary and secondary mirror. The mount it sits on is called a Dobsonian mount, named after John Dobson, a very interesting guy who was a champion of sidewalk astronomy in San Francisco, CA.

    For deep sky and comets I use an astrophotography setup. The scope is an Astro-Tech AT72EDII Refractor. It’s an F5.6 which means it provides a wide view of the sky. This scope is mounted on the Sky-Watcher EQM-35 Equatorial GoTo Mount. This is a tracking mount that keeps objects in the center of the view once it’s polar aligned.

  • When they were still in business, you could get an 8” Orion Dobsonian for about $650. Unfortunately, Orion (and Meade, the company they bought) went out of business in 2024. You can still find plenty of Orion telescopes used on eBay and other online seller marketplaces. Currently Apertura and SkyWatcher make very similar scopes to the Orion XT8 at comparable prices.

  • To show live views I use an adapter that connects my phone to the telescope’s eyepiece called the Move-Shoot-Move Tridapter. This allows you to accurately align your phone’s camera with the eyepiece using a 3-axis adjustment.

    Another useful accessory for sharing live views is a zoom eyepiece like the one made by Celestron. This provides an optical zoom in addition to the digital zoom you can do with your phone’s camera.

    • Stellarium - (iOS | Android | Desktop) Planetarium software that’s available on computers and devices. The desktop version is free, app for devices has in-app purchases to enable more features. Stellarium has updated objects such as comets in addition to complete night sky maps based on your GPS coordinates.

    • Skyview - (iOS | Android)Planetarium software that is similar to Stellarium, but also has an AR mode that uses your camera to superimpose the charts on your actual surroundings. Also has in-app purchases to enable more features.

    • Telescopius - A web-based multi-purpose tool for astronomy, with additional features geared toward visual observers and astrophotographers. The site is free, however you can support the creator (one lone developer) for $1 per month via Patreon. Supporting him will get you access to new features before free users. Telescopius can help you generate observing lists, which are useful if you want to complete any of the observing programs offered by the Astronomical League. You can also plan mosaics for deep sky astrophotography and upload the setting files to your software. It allows you to setup “equipment lists” to show you what objects will look like through your telescope.

  • Here’s a useful tutorial for taking night photos with your iPhone. This one is geared specifically at aurora (the Northern Lights), but the techniques work for other types of night photos as well.

Topical FAQs

  • The “second moon” is real but has been overhyped by the media. In reality, this second moon is about 35 feet across and not visible through amateur telescopes. It is essentially a captured asteroid that will make a partial orbit around Earth and then head back out into space. Facts are your friend in this case.

  • Yes, but probably not in the way you’re hoping. The ISS moves very quickly across the sky when visible, and it’s difficult to keep up with through a manually operated telescope. Plus, it appears only as a bright dot when looking through a telescope at typical magnification, so you’re not going to see the structure. People who photography the ISS do it with very high magnification on telescopes that have been modified to track the ISS during its entire pass.

    If you want to view the ISS when it passes over your area, check out Spot the Station.

  • The Star of Jacob is not a real thing, though it has become confused with a real astronomical event. The Star of Jacob refers to a viral TikTok by a teenage user that claimed he had seen this star, and that it symbolized the second coming of Jesus. It went through several transformations during its trip through the disinformation filter, with some people showing out-of-focus images of the star Sirius, claiming it was the Star of Jacob.

    At some point it was associated with the very real event known as the Blaze Star, or as it’s known in scientific circles, T Coronae Borealis. The Blaze Star is a periodic nova, which historically has become active every 80 years. During its peak, T Coronae Borealis brightens so much that it may appear as a new star in the night sky for a short period.

  • It’s possible to show the general areas where each of the Apollo missions landed, but the various flags and equipment left behind are far too small to be seen with any Earth-based telescope. In theory, a telescope would need to be nearly 700ft in diameter in order to resolve objects that small. Check the link below for more details.

    For an interactive map that shows each manned or robotic landing site on the Moon, click the link below.

Conspiracy FAQs

  • If you don’t know what a Carrington Event is, you’re probably not worried about one. With the Sun being at solar maximum throughout 2024-2025, we’ve seen a lot of large solar events that have produced aurora as far south as Mexico. But the likelihood that we could soon experience another Carrington event is miniscule; approximately 1.9%, in fact.

    A Carrington Event takes its name from the astronomer who observed this type of Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) that occurred in 1859, Richard Carrington. According to the units of measure we have today for solar activity, this one would have “buried the needle”, so to speak. It was so powerful that aurora was seen all over the globe. It sparked fires, caused telegraph outages, caused ship compasses to fail, and generally scared the wits out of everyone who witnessed it. In northern latitudes the aurora were so bright that birds thought it was morning and began to chirp. If you want to read more about the original Carrington event, click here.

    Conspiracy theorists and people with very little understanding of solar events have been posting about a “high probability” of a Carrington Event happening soon due to the Sun being at its peak cycle. This would indeed cause major damage to our electronic infrastructure, if it were to occur. But any predictions of said event are not true and the people who post these things are just baiting you for views and clicks. To borrow a quote Stacker Pentecost from ‘Pacific Rim’, “Today we are cancelling the apocalypse!”

    Can an event of this magnitude happen? As we said before, there’s a 1.9% chance of it. Another study found that there’s an estimated 0.7% probability of a Carrington Event each calendar year. An event that size would be catastrophic, especially since we have so much more electronic technology that we depend on now, but due to the rare nature it cannot be predicted. Anyone who says they can is lying to you.

    For more information on the scientific research that has been done on Carrington Event probability, you can read about it in this EarthSky article.

  • Any of these conspiracy theories can be researched and debunked with a minimal amount of Internet searching. Educate yourself. Science is real.

  • Unless you hear it direct from scientists and world governments, these claims are 100% false, misleading, and/or clickbait. Think about it very carefully. If this were real, it would most likely be one of the following scenarios:

    • It’s going to happen in the very near future, there’s nothing we can do about it, and it’s an extinction level event. Would it be to the benefit of world leaders or humanity to share this information and induce the inevitable panic, death, and destruction it most certainly would cause?

    • It’s going to happen farther in the future and the best scientists and government resources will be put into action to try and prevent it. In this case world leaders would most likely control the flow of information and release it in a methodical way to try and reduce panic and price gouging that would inevitably happen.

    • It’s going to happen several generations in the future. In most cases these types of discoveries can’t be predicted with a high level of accuracy. The closest example is Apophis, a 1000-foot-wide asteroid that will pass within 30,000 miles of Earth in less than a decade. “Pass within” is the key phrase here. There’s no current evidence that Apophis will impact Earth. A more distant possibility is asteroid Bennu, which could possibly slip into Earth’s orbit and impact in 2182.

    Asteroids have hit the Earth before, like the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. In a universe as big as ours, impacts are a known occurrence. Our own Moon is littered with craters from impacts of all sizes, and in fact we’ve actually caught images of impacts there as they happen. We should, of course, always be researching and improving our science around asteroid impacts and possible ways to prevent them. But individually we do things every day that are statistically more likely to unalive us - we drive to work, fly to far away destinations, eat food that may be carrying e-coli or other dangerous bacteria, refuse to wear masks during a pandemic…. 🙄

    Don’t fall for clickbait! Think critically! The announcement about a humanity-ending asteroid is probably not going to come from sources that you might normally trust for information, such as news networks or pop science and technology websites. They’re just as prone to clickbait headlines as anyone these days. And such an announcement definitely won’t come from a TikToker with a name like YeetYoMama69.

    • “That’s not the Sun. That’s a fried egg.”

    • “The Moon is made of plasma.”

    • “The Moon is a superstructure.”

    • “That’s not Saturn. You’re just showing a picture.”

This FAQ is maintained for Sunshine Nate by David the NK Stargazer. If you have questions or issues, e-mail nkastronomy@gmail.com.

For business inquiries contact sunshinenatestudios@gmail.com.