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Fun with Telescopes! - mrs.b - 01-05-2014
My son got a fantastic Christmas present from one of his grandparents - an Orion XT8 telescope - and we got it assembled today, and had to try it out. It was fairly overcast but there were a few breaks in the clouds, sort of, but we were still able to spot and zone in on Jupiter! So amazing. We saw two of the stripes, and the four Galilean moons. This picture (which I am still terrible at embedding, so it's likely going to be a clicky) was taken with a camera phone and does not do justice to what we saw, but it was the best we could get; our regular camera kept trying to correct for the movement and just blurred it, so we need to work out a better camera setup.
Too late, we realized if we'd looked earlier in the night we might have seen Neptune, but we're going to give that a shot earlier in the night tomorrow night before taking another look at Jupiter, then maybe some of the nebulae.
Consider us stargazers! My little budding astronomer was staying overnight with his grandparents, so we were experimenting without him to get it figured out without him growing impatient, but I can't wait to see his face when he looks through the eyepiece the first time.
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Fun with Telescopes! - bluebooger - 01-05-2014
NASA - Spot The Station
Fun with Telescopes! - Westerner - 01-05-2014
That is awesome!! I'm a huge fan of the solar system. Got to look through a telescope once at an observatory and it was the most amazing thing—we saw the Moon and Jupiter, among other things. It emphasizes our smallness in the universe and gives a greater appreciation for our God Who created it all. :coolgleam:
Fun with Telescopes! - mrs.b - 01-05-2014
The ISS is definitely on our list, but it's further down after we've got a better feel for how to focus the telescope quickly. It is only viewable for narrow windows of time that make it a tough one to capture. During our impromptu Astronomy lessons today, we also learned we should put Neptune further down on the list until closer to...May, I think? (found a website that shows when the planets are closest to earth for easier viewing) due to its distance and dimmer light reflection that makes it harder to spot. We did figure out how the Intelli- portion of our Intelliscope works, though! So next time, aiming should be easier once we've got it configured on focus stars.
We've viewed the images from the local observatory too when Bug and Hubs started the Earth & Space section of their science lessons, but there was something absolutely magical about finding the target ourselves and seeing the results. We did make an amateur mistake, in that we were looking through a 25mm eyepiece which is great, but we had a 10mm available and should have swapped that in to see more surface detail and the moons in more detail. We do not yet have any filters to correct for light pollution or color diffusion, and only a 10mm and 25mm lens, and no Barlows, but they're all on our "to buy" list the next time we've got some free cash handy.
We were going to try to get another glimpse of Jupiter tonight, this time with the other eyepiece. Tonight is when Jupiter is closest to earth in its orbit, but unfortunately the weather is against us with heavy cloud cover and rain.
Our list of targets is ever-growing, though, so any suggestions that might be easy to spot for beginners just learning the ropes is greatly appreciated!
Fun with Telescopes! - Westerner - 04-15-2014
Who's watching the lunar eclipse (blood moon) tonight? Thankfully we have clear skies here! The Earth's shadow is slowly creeping across the Moon...
Edit: 12:45 Pacific - the moon is currently red!
Fun with Telescopes! - DSH2007 - 04-15-2014
Heh, heh. We watched from 11:30 to 12:25 pst and were disappointed when the moon didn't turn red. Found out this morning we went in ten minutes too early!
Well... there's always next time.
milelol:
Fun with Telescopes! - Westerner - 04-15-2014
Yes...it took a while. We recently got a small telescope (!!!) so were excited to use it to see the phenomenon in more detail :coolgleam:
Fun with Telescopes! - mrs.b - 04-16-2014
Westerner Wrote:Yes...it took a while. We recently got a small telescope (!!!) so were excited to use it to see the phenomenon in more detail :coolgleam:
So jealous! We'll have to catch the next one. I'm down with a wicked case of the flu (woke today on the up-side I think, so there's that!), my husband is having a tough time with seasonal allergies, and the in-laws are watching our son so he doesn't get the germ. We were in bed by 6:30
Fun with Telescopes! - Getiton1 - 04-17-2014
Beautiful!
Fun with Telescopes! - Westerner - 04-18-2014
mrs.b Wrote:So jealous! We'll have to catch the next one. I'm down with a wicked case of the flu (woke today on the up-side I think, so there's that!), my husband is having a tough time with seasonal allergies, and the in-laws are watching our son so he doesn't get the germ. We were in bed by 6:30Oh, that's too bad
But! Don't worry, there will be 3 more blood moons within the next year that you can see (this was the first of a "tetrad"). Did You Get to See the Blood Moon? Catch It Again Live On These 2014 and 2015 Dates: Latin Post More eclipses: http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/OH/OH2014.html