My friend Micheal knows I have taken up astronomy and sent me this page, 15+ Sites for Backyard Astronomers.  I’ve checked out a few of the sites mentioned, but most of them were new to me.  I’m a little surprised that Google Earth’s Sky made it into the list but Microsoft’s World Wide Telescope didn’t.  I’ve used both and I’ll honestly say I’m a bit more impressed with WWT then Sky.

I spent over an hour on Sunday collimating the Celestron and my Meade 4502 then took some time that night to compare the two. Unluckily the fog and clouds had other ideas and all I was able to do was get a couple glimpses of the moon and Arcturus. But that was enough to make me glad I’d gotten the Celestron. The difference between the light gathering capabilities of the two scopes is immense; the Meade has an aperture of F/8, while the Celestron’s is F/5. Even when the two are at approximately the same magnification, the Celestron makes it possible to see stars that I never could with the Meade. The Parks eyepiece is pretty good, it’s nice to be able to zoom in on a star without having to change eyepieces, but it doesn’t perform the zoom to 8mm without having to refocus slightly. My next purchase will be a decent Barlow, to extend the capabilities of the scope even farther.

Last night was the first night I was able to use the telescope properly and it made me realize how much I have to learn about the sky and the stars out there. I was able to not only pick up Saturn but see one of it’s moons, even if it was just as a little tiny dot. I also got to see my first Messier object, which I think was M64, near Coma Berenices, but I’m not 100% certain. I’m glad I’d read a little about observing nebula/galaxies and knew enough not to expect much more than a slight smudge of light in the eyepiece when viewing from a light polluted place like my backyard.

The mount has an attachment point for a camera, and I’ll probably put a small camera on it from time to time. Without a goto mount or motor of some sort it’s not worth trying to do any serious astrophotography right now. Maybe once my wife has gotten over this purchase I’ll start looking into a motor, say in six months or so. ]]> http://amatuerastronomer.com/2008/05/21/celestron-c8n-meade-ldx300-tripod/feed http://amatuerastronomer.com/2008/04/26/stripes-on-jupiter http://amatuerastronomer.com/2008/04/26/stripes-on-jupiter#comments Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:46:41 +0000 martin http://amatuerastronomer.com/2008/04/26/stripes-on-jupiter I got to see the stripes on Jupiter for the first time this morning. I was up at 5:50 this morning and decided to venture into the backyard. The sky was clear but lightening already, so the only two objects still visible in the sky were the Moon and Jupiter, about 5 degrees apart in the southern sky. It only took a couple of minutes to get everything set up; my Meade 4502 sits under a covered porch in the backyard and was acclimatized. With my medium eyepiece in I was able to see four of the moons and barely see three distinct stripes on Jupiter. I tried viewing with my 4mm eyepiece, but it had been inside the house and fogged up just as I was getting Jupiter in focus.

On a side note, I put the telescope together with the garage sale mount on the Meade legs. The garage sale mount works better for small adjustments since I don’t have the motors for the Meade mount. The Meade tripod is a lot better than the wooden legs the garage sale mount came with, so it all works out for the best. I’ll post some pictures in a week or two.

The boys favorite part was the Ask Jeeves Planetarium. We watched a show called Beyond Blastoff: Surviving in Space. We, meaning the wife and I, had decided to become members at Chabot, since the difference between a membership and day use for a family of four was less than it would cost for two visits and gave us reduced entry costs to a number of other museums. Membership also comes with a separate line for the theater, so we were the first one’s allowed in. We chose seats as close to the center of the theater as possible, but the truth be told, I don’t think there were any really bad seats in the whole place. The boy’s favorite part of the whole movie was an animated sequence where a scientist subjected astronaut ‘Chad’ and his clones to all of the hazards of space one by one. They particularly liked the part where cosmic radiation turned Chad into a living DNA molecule. My wife’s favorite part was listening to Ewen McGregor narrate.

For adults, the majority of the Center get’s boring pretty quickly, but it is definitely set up with a lot of photo ops in mind. There’s a mock up of a Mercury lander (or is it a shuttle, I forget) for the kids to sit in. There’s a series of interactive exhibits that are very similar to what you can find at the Exporitorium, each of which are designed to show a particular aspect of space. There was even a real meteorite that one of guides was letting the children (and adults) hold.

The draw for me was the telescopes; Chabot is home to the largest refractor (20″) in the world that’s still open to the public. They also have a 36″ reflector. Both telescopes are open to the public Friday nights. I don’t know when, but I’ll make the time to get there soon! Hidden in one corner of the observatory was a cache of 10 or so smaller telescopes, some of which are models I’ve been looking at purchasing when I have a few (hundred) dollars to spare. Later in the afternoon they had a scope set up for viewing the sun, but I didn’t get to see any of the sun spots they said might be visible.

If you have young children and an afternoon to spare, Chabot is well worth the visit. If nothing else the drive up is beautiful and it’s worth taking a look down on Oakland. Both of my boys want to go back, though my youngest says he prefers the Exploritorium. Given that we’ve been there half a dozen times in the last two years, I’m ready for something different, a role Chabot fills well.

It’s now thirty years later. I had eye surgery with the result of 20/20 vision. But more importantly, I’m married with two small boys of my own. One night several months ago our family was coming home from a dinner out as the sun went down and we saw Sirius as it rose above the horizon. The only problem was, I didn’t know it was Sirius at the time. I realized that I still didn’t know any of the constellations beyond the Big Dipper myself, and that if I didn’t change that, neither would my sons. The night sky is too vast and too beautiful for me to allow my sons to grow up as ignorant of it as I was.

Since that night I’ve purchase a number of books (mostly on bargain table) and several magazines. I’ve been to the local observatory, both by myself and with the boys. I’ve even used my youngest son as an excuse to attend the local junior astronomers club. Neither of the boys are certain they want to spend much time looking at the stars, but they do like spending time with Daddy. And there’s little in the world that compares with a six-year-old exclaiming “I found it! I found Mars!” as he looks through the binoculars.

I have a several pairs of decent binoculars and I’m looking to purchase my first telescope as soon as I can afford it. I’m searching the web for astronomy resources. I’m joining the local astronomy groups and even trying my hand at a little astrophotography. This is the place I’ll be writing about it all. And I have a little bit of experience at blogging, since I’ve been running the Network Security Blog since 2003.

One last note: ‘amatuer’ is how you spell ‘amateur’ if you rely on Wikipedia to do your spell checking.