Stan’s Obligatory Blog

It’s a warm and still night here in Pasadena, so I got out my telescope. Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon are all up in the early evening right now. So Lucinda and I went outside and set up the telescope.

We had a look at Jupiter first. The air is very still tonight, so even though it’s a bit hazy, the seeing was quite good. I was able to run 200x and still get a good image. I was able to see the Great Red Spot, which crossed the meridian at 8:03 PDT.

Saturn was nice, too. It’s not completely dark, so I was only able to see three of its moons. But it’s still fun to look at.

The moon is a crescent, which allows for lots of nice shadows from the mountains and craters.

So, in the interest of making an experiment, I got my camera out. I don’t have a fancy camera, or even a way to actually attach it to the telescope. I just used some packing tape and taped it to the eyepiece. Then I set it on no-flash-night-mode and a 10-second timer. And here are the results. You can’t see the cloud bands or Red Spot on Jupiter, but you can see the four Galilean satellites. You can’t see any of Saturn’s moons. But the craters on the Moon came out pretty well.