Piedmont Amateur Astronomers
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The club was founded on June 28, 1988 and our first event was an observation of the Perseid meteor shower of that year.
The Piedmont Amateur Astronomers are a group of individuals who meet to share an interest in astronomy and to promote astronomy education in and around Statesville, NC. To commemorate this event, the club logo was designed around the constellation Perseus and has 3 lines ending in stars to indicate meteor trails.
04/25/2026
With the Piedmont Amateur Astronomers!
04/25/2026
The PIEDMONT AMATEUR ASTRONOMERS were in attendance at the STATEWIDE STAR PARTY event tonight at LAKE NORMAN STATE PARK. we showed analog and digital images of the stars and planets to 110 Park guests and campers
Look what we can do with our MLASTRO Spectroheliograph SHG700. New softwares allows us to create a video and rotate the sun around on it's axis!!!
04/21/2026
North Carolina Statewide Star Party – North Carolina Science Festival Thanks to generous grant support from the North Carolina Space Grant, the 2026 North Carolina Science Festival will again feature the Statewide Star Party as a signature initiative.
I got the SKY-WATCHER HELIOSTAR76 out & shot this 2 panel mosaic of NOAA AR4246 as it was flaring. I used the ALTAIR ASTRO GPCAM678m with it's 2.0 micron pixels tp capture this high resolution image.
You can see a light bridge in the core and lots of active filaments in the image as well as spicules.
I processed the image in b&w for the purists and then made a copy and colorized it with my custom solar colorization script in Photoshop.
10/11/2025
Ronnie Sherrill sharing astronomy images and stories with the Civil Air Patrol.
I finally got the SKYWATCHER HELIOSTAR out under a clear sky with decent seeing and was able to take a couple of images. I am really impressed with this scope. The views in the eyepiece are SPECTACULAR!!! And the camera view is pretty incredible, too,
Look at the limb. You don't see the dark line along the limb that I have always wanted to get rid of so badly. In processing I barely touched the contrast and sharpening was VERY minimal.
I was limited in time to be outside today, but there appears to be a couple of more clear days in the near future, so I'm hoping to get back outside with this scope soon, and to start putting it through it's paces!
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