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 sensor1.
It was a great night for observing, the forecast said, with no cloud cover, good transparency2, good seeing3, 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 past4, until Saturn slowly drifted out of view.
- I have no plans on getting into prime focus astrophotography — in which the telescope is used as a lens — because the astronomy equipment required is much more expensive. [↩]
- Calculated from the amount of water vapour in the air. [↩]
- Estimated from turbulence and temperature differences in the atmosphere. [↩]
- Saturn was 8.505AU or 1,272,330,990km away, which takes about 4080 seconds for the light to hit our eyes from there. [↩]
WOW I want to see Saturn pics! or will that be too small to show up? This is really much more nice a shot than I thought you’d find possible.
No Saturn pics, unfortunately. I don’t have the equipment to do that, cause it’s way too expensive at this point.
This is awesome! Has anyone ever told you you are incredibly smart? :)
Anyway, I too would never get into astrophotography.. doesn’t interest me and it is hell expensiveeeee!
Actually, I do want to get into astrophotography because it interests me greatly.
There are about four methods of doing it, and using the telescope as a lens (called “prime focus imaging”) is just one. The other three types use regular camera lenses, because even wide-angle landscape shots are considered astrophotography if they have stars in them, so it’s quite affordable.