AlphariusLa #Luna desde mi terraza. La foto no le hace justicia, está sacada con el móvil pegado al ocular, imaginad el espectáculo.
Telescopio: Dobson 250mm
Ocular: ES 8.8mm 82° (142 aumentos)
danaWe've been visiting with Jupiter and its four largest moons - Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto - this week, with the Celestron 4.5 inch reflector. Quick to set up and get pointed. We're using an Oliphon 20mm eyepiece with a good field of view. Gets a nice yellow tone on Jupiter.
I had an urge to set up the ten inch dobsonian tonight, but I see the nearly full moon rising in the east. So much for that....
@WestportObservatory Stellarium also is quite useful for understanding what's where and when.
@MikeImBack Follow the advice of the commenter who recommends Ed Ting's reviews.
Watch out for 4.5 inch reflectors that are catadioptric -- that is, they have a correcting lens in the focuser tube. There are a lot of them out there. It allows for a shorter tube, but makes them difficult to collimate (collimation is the process of aligning the primary and secondary mirrors in a reflector).
Have fun shopping.
Orion right out there shining over the back yard, as I wake up and make the coffee.
Dana PriesingHercules is a tough constellation for me. The stars in it are not super bright, and when one starts looking, it turns out there a lot of vaguely keystone-shaped asterisms up there, from which one's imagination can compose the torso of Hercules.
Happily, there are star maps. And I know that one can draw a line from Sulafat through Sheliak, in the constellation Lyra; and drawing that line outward in a direction away from the constellation Cygnus brings one right to Messier 13, the Great Star Cluster in Hercules, in a location that maps to right above Hercules' right hip in the torso keystone asterism.
But when one is looking down at the star map with a red light, then craning back one's neck to look upward, it all gets rather confused. So last night I tried a different method: I brought out the binoculars (big Oberwerk 12x60 LERs capable of spotting M13), and reclined in a chair, so no longer looking down, then up.
Better result. The Sulafat-Sheliak line took me right to M13, and I was able to work out the torso keystone from there. Still, my neck complained after 20 minutes of this game. Next time I try this I'll bring a blanket out and simply lie on my back.
#VisualAstronomy
#Constellations
Happily, there are star maps. And I know that one can draw a line from Sulafat through Sheliak, in the constellation Lyra; and drawing that line outward in a direction away from the constellation Cygnus brings one right to Messier 13, the Great Star Cluster in Hercules, in a location that maps to right above Hercules' right hip in the torso keystone asterism.
But when one is looking down at the star map with a red light, then craning back one's neck to look upward, it all gets rather confused. So last night I tried a different method: I brought out the binoculars (big Oberwerk 12x60 LERs capable of spotting M13), and reclined in a chair, so no longer looking down, then up.
Better result. The Sulafat-Sheliak line took me right to M13, and I was able to work out the torso keystone from there. Still, my neck complained after 20 minutes of this game. Next time I try this I'll bring a blanket out and simply lie on my back.
#VisualAstronomy
#Constellations
Fairly decent skies last night so I had the 10-inch dobsonian reflector out back, peering at Messier 51 and Messier 101 near Ursa Major. Nice to have a chance at it; the skies have been so cloudy of late.
#astrodon
#visualastronomy
#astrodon
#visualastronomy