Monday, December 21, 2009

Waking up early...


I got up at 5:30am (early for me) to see Saturn. Every night it's on the other side of the Earth and it's sort of the belle of the ball when it comes to sky watching. So... at 50x this pic is about what you see (not super big, but discernible as Saturn w/ rings). I'm glad I saw it, but I'm not likely to get up early again any time soon without having some filters and different eyepieces to get me closer. :)

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Alignment Success!


So we had another clear night. I even got out there early enough to look at the moon and maaaaannnnn it's unbelievable. It filled the entire eyepiece at 50x and I'm just glad it wasn't any fuller.



I wish this was a pic I'd taken, but I'll need a planetary imager for that (special digital camera for telescope mounting).

Friday, December 18, 2009

Clear Friday Night


What do Orion's Nebula, Jupiter and it's moons and Mars all have in common? I looked at all of them tonight. :)



I still can't seem to get the knack of aligning my goto system. It says to align with any 3 bright objects, but I'm thinking that I need an AC adapter because by the time I get it panned around much the motors are getting slowed down. Maybe l-ion batteries or something. Anyway...



I'm out there letting the scope get cooled off to the night temperature and Amy and her mom and the boy get home so I'm all like, "Hey, wanna see Jupiter?" since I can recognize it and remember where it was. I pulled it up and I swear the "seeing" was good enough to recognize the bands even at only 50x power. Seeing is the quality of the atmosphere that you are looking through. To determine the power you divide the focal point (1250mm in my case) by the eyepiece (25mm) and end up with 50x. James is bringing me a 6.7mm which should push me up to 187x so that'll be over 3 times closer to things than I am now :) I can't wait to see what Jupiter and Mars look like then!



So... Orion's Nebula at 50x is pretty much a seashell cloud that you can barely see in the city, but I don't care because I saw it.



Anyway I'm geeking out too much so I'm going to look at some interweb and call it a night.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

2nd shot

So... tonight is the Geminid Meteor Shower and it's foggy here. It wasn't foggy when we got home, but now it is. I'm not complaining because even though my batteries sucked (I need new rechargeable ones or something) I had a good time w/ my telescope and showing Harrison.



So... dead batteries (or mostly dead) and fog setting in I looked at a bright "star in the western sky (under the trees in my back yard) and when I adjusted the focus...

This is what we saw. Not quite this big, but the moons were lined up just like that (inverted due to my diagonal tube) and obviously not labelled. This image is from my planetarium software using my location and the time we were observing to show the position at that moment in time.



Nothing was between me and the largest planet in our solar system except a few pieces of glass and a bunch of space. That concept literally blows me away. Hopefully I can get some clear skies and some decent batteries for next time, but I can say that every time is fun (so far).

Thursday, December 10, 2009

New Telescope


So... everyone who reads anything here knows that I had a new telescope coming and yesterday it arrived! Huge 40lb box, un-boxing and first assembly took about 30 min, but I'd already watched a video a few days ago. I didn't get the guidance system to work yet, but I did successfully get the star finder (laser sight) sighted in so if you put the red dot on a star it's centered in the eyepiece. That little tidbit the instructions forgot to mention. :)



All I successfully saw was a few stars in Orion (Betelgeuse, etc), but at least I was able to point and see what I was aiming at (after working on it an hour). I only have one eyepiece (25x I believe) and it's pretty danged close so you go from naked eye to in your face. I probably need something a little more in between too but that'll come later. I'm very excited and had fun even though it was late and I was only semi-successful.