Fun with Telescopes!

[mrs.b]

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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