Look, it's the moon!

Seeing the moon may not seem all that remarkable, but I was able to see it up close for the first time this weekend. We borrowed a telescope from a friend last month and have been trying to use it ever since. Friday night was the first time we had any success.

We were invited to participate in a public stargazing event in Pasco County. It was a long drive, but so worth it. The constant rains the last several weeks made viewing impossible. Friday night there were some clouds when we first arrived, but as the event started, the skies cleared and stayed clear. We were instructed on how to get the finder scope and the viewer scope aligned. Without doing so, it's really hard to find anything in the sky. Once that was done, it was all fun! We were able to check out the moon and see the craters and smooth areas, mountains and valleys. It really is amazing to see the Moon close up with your own eyes. It kept sliding out of view, but we were able to make small adjustments to get it back quickly most of the time. Phil is much better than I am, I kept moving the telescope in the wrong direction and would lose the view. The telescope we were using was giving us a 45x view, 45 times the size we can see with our eyes. Here a couple of photos I took with our regular camera. (You can click on any of the photos to see a larger version)

Straight out of camera:


With camera zoomed in a bit:

You can see from the first two photos that a regular camera doesn't show the size of the moon the same as your eyes would see it. That is interesting enough on it's own. But, if I zoomed in much it would get too wiggly to be anything but a blur. My camera is a point and shoot digital, and I couldn't find a way to reduce the shutter speed to cut down on the amount of light, so the close up photo isn't anywhere near as clear as the view through the telescope with your eyes, but is about the right size.

Photo taken through viewfinder:


As the sky got darker, we were able to shift a little and get a view of Saturn. The telescope we are using is considered a beginner level. We could see Saturn, and could tell there were rings, but the rings looked more like little bursts of light shooting from the top and the bottom of the planet. We looked through more powerful telescopes set up around us and could clearly see the rings and 3 of Saturn's moons. It was so beautiful. It was also a little like looking a picture since the image appears flat, but with the thrill of knowing it isn't a picture at all. Saturn is 862,389,000 miles from earth as of today, which means what you are seeing with your eyes happened 77 minutes ago. I wonder if there is a difference when you are viewing with a telescope. Are you seeing light that hasn't reached Earth yet, or are you just seeing it closer? Hmmmm...

Here are some photos of Saturn. The first is as my camera saw it when pointed at the sky. Can you even tell there is a dot of light in that photo?


This second photo is through the viewerscope, and does not replicate what we saw well due to movement.



You can't see much there, partially due to the light issue with the camera that I had with the moon. The distance of Saturn also causes problems. The farther something is from earth, the faster it will move out of view in the telescope. Earth's rotation is constant of course, but distance makes things smaller, which makes them appear to move more quickly and be harder to find.

I'll share more as we learn.