Remote Controlled Telescopes / One more reason to learn Italian

Having had a telescope for a month now I've been enjoying looking up from my backyard and from a few darker places (In-laws field, my mom's house). My brother gave me some new eyepieces at Christmas that he'd been using (he's got a bunch) which then gave me a total of 3 (9mm, 15mm, 25mm) which give me 3 powers of magnification (138x, 83x, 50x). Now having a big aperture matters to me way more since the higher the magnification the smaller the opening (and less light can come through).



So... I've gone from mostly wide field viewing to some deeper looks that have shown me the rings of Saturn pretty well, stripes on Jupiter, the Orion Nebula and when I look hard enough the Andromeda Galaxy (little blurry cloud by eye). It's come to my attention that just like CG movies (which are really just a bunch of still frames knitted together and take months to render), astronomers use cameras to "look" at space. You can see things with your eye, but having a camera allows you to go further and coincidentally is how many astronomers do their job.




This pic is of the Andromeda Galaxy using the GRAS 3 (http://www.global-rent-a-scope.com/) which isn't really that much larger than mine. Theirs is a 160mm and mine is 125mm. Their's is all super wicked and has special coatings (hence it's a $30k telescope), but due to having a free trial I get to play with it. Anyone interested needs to jump on the bandwagon since I've already gotten 3 sessions out of it and I'm only about 1/3rd through my alloted time/points.



Now I'd be lying if I said that's what it looked like to begin with - it was a black and white image and I through some color in to show off the shape of the galaxy a bit. That's a 10 minute exposure (tracking obviously).



Anyway - I'm having fun and I can't wait to get my adapter to take pics on my own (physically). :)