
Tonight, I saw the moon in my telescope. If it was a full moon, it would have filled the eyepiece. I could study the craters, the landmarks, and the patterns of dust on the surface. I grabbed my camera with a modestly long 100mm lens, mounted it on my new tripod, and took a picture. Unless I get a lens with a longer focal length, it’s the best I’ll ever get in capturing the moon with a sensor.
It was a great night for observing, the forecast said, with no cloud cover, good transparency, good seeing, and decent darkness. I had my warmest clothes on, as I was warned that comfort and motivation are some of the most important things in observational astronomy.
I used a crater on the moon to calibrate my red-dot finderscope. Then I used the finderscope to follow the arm of the big dipper to Arcturus, the curve of which led me to Saturn, just under Denebola and in the constellation Virgo this year.
With the naked eye, Saturn looks like another bright star, but at 100x magnification, Saturn becomes a small and sharp sphere. The rings were clean but indistinguishable from each other, with the gas giant casting a dramatic shadow across them.
I looked 68 minutes into the past, until Saturn slowly drifted out of view.