I have just come in from another night of playing with the best present I have ever received, a telescope.
It’s something I’ve wanted for a while, but never desperately enough that I’ve done any serious research or examining of the options, or even looked in a telescope shop. However my girlfriend on the other hand must have done quite a bit of research as the telescope she got me for my birthday is not a cheap entry level small telescope, it’s actually quite a large and ‘proper’ telescope (with all sorts of stuff on the mount that I have no idea what it does at the moment) and it’s amazing.
The other night I managed to take some fairly good pictures of the moon (see end of post) considering I took them by just pointing my point and shoot digital camera down the eye-piece (not the best way to take pictures with a telescope – something I’m trying to rectify).
But tonight I managed to find Jupiter (which was actually quite easy with Stellarium on board) and got a good enough view to be able to distinguish the different coloured bands on Jupiter itself and could cleary identify all 4 of its moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto), it looked exactly like this screenshot taken from Stellarium (except without the name tags, and the moons aren’t as big – that’s Stellarium pointing them out to you):
I’ve never even identified where Jupiter was in the sky before tonight, never mind seen it so clearly in real life and it was fantastic – I must have spent the best part of an hour tracking it and watching it.
So take this as a warning that if I get a bit more into this astrophotography lark that I may be posting more pictures, if it ends up being silly I’ll separate them out to a different RSS feed though.
Here are my pictures of the moon from Wednesday 11th June 2008:
Comments
There have been 4 comments so far, join the discussion.
1. Boris Reitman - 24th Jun 2008 - 12:51 pm
Dude, I’ve had a telescope but I could never figure out how to target it correctly. Your post makes me want to try it again.
2. Dave - 24th Jun 2008 - 2:09 pm
I’d give it another try, it’s taken me a couple of weeks to really get used to it (I only got it polar aligned properly last time out ) and that made a lot of difference. Plus I think Stellarium really helps, being able to sit there and get an accurate 3D representation of what you should see in the sky at that given moment is really helpful.
3. cuptie - 11th Jan 2009 - 10:31 pm
hi, IM thinking about getting a telescope, out of curiosity, what is the make/model of the one you got?
nice pics of the moon by the way.
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