I have a decent backyard telescope, and up until now have confined myself to looking at objects in the solar system. I love looking at Saturn and Jupiter. Even though they are very small, I always get a thrill seeing them through the lens with my own eyes.
Last night, I got a little more ambitious and went looking for the Orion nebula. And I found it! Obviously, it didn’t look anything like the photos you can see on the web, but the baby stars and the wisp of gas I could make out was awe-inspiring. There is something about seeing for yourself that makes standing in the freezing cold worthwhile.
Anyway, this column was in this month’s Scientific American. It nicely captures what I had always thought about standing in the backyard, looking at the planets.
So, does anyone else have backyard astronomy stories to tell us?
And I would love any suggestions for cool things that a viewable through a modest telescope such as mine. I have realistic expectations for how vivid the sight will be, but I’m a simple man, and it doesn’t take much to make my night!
I’m excited about comet ISON. I guess it’s visible now in the eastern sky right before sunrise. I’ve woken up early a couple times but its alway been cloudy. I’ve heard that on thanksgiving its suppose to be brighter than the full moon, so hoping for clear skies.
I’ve had a bushnell telescope for years and have observed the full moon a few times, also noticed that Venus appeared to be partially eclipsed until I found out it had phases like moon. Keeping the telescope steady enough for the planets has always been a chore for me, so I really only bring it out on a warm night with a full moon.
If you’re not familiar with the Star Chart app you ought to check it out. In my backyard I hold my Iphone up and it’ll display a graphic telling me what stars, planets and constallations I’m looking at, which meteor showers are active and where they’d come from, same for comets, satellites, etc. What’s wild is you can point it more toward the ground and it’ll show you what’s not yet on the horizon. Pretty cool.
Somehow I’d escaped mention of ISON until last night when one of the educational channels had an hour show on it. It sounds potentially fantastic and as you say it’s time to start looking. I hope one of our more astronomically astute dopers starts a thread on it.
ISON link. I have the star walk app on my iPhone, I believe that’s the one your talking about unless there are two similiar apps. It does exactly what you just described.
I have SkyView, but for some reason I can’t get it calibrated properly on my iPhone. So for planets, it’s great because it’s close enough for jazz. For other objects, though, it’s not so good.
I picked up some 20x80 binoculars a few years ago. They’re very large so I got a nice tripod as well. Here in New Mexico the air is clear, it’s easy to get away from city lights and we’re at high elevation- fine conditions for skygazing. And yes, the Orion Nebula is quite impressive through my binos.
D18, I suggest you start looking at the Messier Objects- starting with M31, the Andromeda Galaxy. Even a small telescope gives you a spectacular view.
The Messier list is a good place to start. The Iphone apps are cool, but I’ve never been able to calibrate one to make it worth my while.
Download Stellariumfor free, and enable satellites, comets, and more, and you can find lots of cool things to step outside and find. Heavens Abovewill also help you find when the ISS or other satellites will be within view. Plug in your location, and Viola! UFOs!
Cool! I remember looking for that nebula as a kid, with my Edmund 4 1/4" reflector, and IIRC the best I found was kind of a smudge. Ditto for galaxies; I had a hard time finding them. Part of the problem is I never had a decent mount. Silly me, would have been easy to just sink a cedar post into the beach sand, and cobble up some kind of hardware to drive into that.
I was lucky as a youth to spend much of the summer on a beach in Michigan on Lake Huron, in the 60’s and 70’s. As a teen, I had a 9x9 canvas tent that I often slept in.
At the time, Jupiter was visible at night in the West. I could clearly see the 4 Galilean moons. One time I saw only three moons, but could see the shadow of one on Jupiter’s surface. I never could quite make out the red spot or any surface details, it was just a bit white circle.
In particular, I remember one August when I would put the scope in the tent and set a wind-up alarm clock for 3:30 AM, and wake to watch Saturn. Its rings were on about a 45 degree angle and I could make them out pretty clearly, but not any space between them or between them and the planet. More like an inverse silhouette, blazing white on black. Then Venus would rise, and then the moon, and then the sun. And then I’d drag myself back in the tent (sometimes after a quick sail in the sunrise: the lake was usually crystal clear and calm, with nice puffs, at sunrise) and then drag my butt back into the tent and sleep until the sun beating on my tent made it too hot, around 9 or 10AM.
Well, recently I got an Android phone and loaded Google Sky. Something reminded me of the above, so I guessed which year it might have been and roughly the date and time, and plugged them in, and sure enough, the heavenly bodies lined up just as I remembered. That gave me a smile. Google Sky ROCKS – no doubt it’s pretty much like the iPhone apps mentioned above. I sure would have loved to have had something like that back in the 70’s!
Thanks for mentioning ISON. I hadn’t heard about it.
The thing that’s really amazing about sky gazing through a telescope is that you’re actually seeing it directly. Live! as if it were as much as the speed-of-light allows. The view isn’t filtered or edited - you’re looking at the original. It’s NOT a picture, or an animation, or a ???
One way to think about it - what if Jupiter exploded into a million pieces while you’re viewing it? YOU would be a direct eye-witness to the event.
I had a nice Tasco 60mm refractor with an equatorial mount when I was in junior high. I remember the night I first saw the rings of Saturn with it. It was 22 September 1969.
I served as the Astronomy TA for three years when I was in college. We had a planetarium and a great observatory that was rectangular instead of round, the advantage being that we could have more than one instrument at a time. The biggest scope was a 25-inch reflector that gave unbelievable views of the Moon. We were also able to see asteroids and pick up Halley’s comet while it was still out beyond Saturn.
In grad school, I had free run of the observatory the three summers I was at Middlebury. It was Vermont, which meant it was dark and clear most nights. I used to stay out well past midnight on Fridays and Saturdays, listening to Beethoven and finding Messier objects. I once found M57 at the zenith just as midnight pealed and the Fifth Symphony reached its coda. It was awesome!
Lots of other stuff, like seeing the Zodiacal light before dawn after being up all night in rural Wisconsin, and watching the ISS disappear into the Earth’s shadow on the coast of the Baltic. I’m in Toronto now, where the weather is crappy and the light pollution makes it hard to observe (I now have a nice 90mm refractor with an equatorial mount), but I hope to get a view of Ison before it gets any closer to the Sun.
Thanks for your stories and suggestions. Definitely will get Turn Left at Orion! I just did some reading on Messier Objects. I love the fact that it was a list of really cool things that he had no interest in. For that, the man gets immortalized!
How 'bout some advice on magnification. I realize that as magnification goes up, brightness goes down. What’s the sweet spot for casual enthusiasts such as myself?
This is precisely why we say aperture is king. The larger the aperture (diameter), the brighter view you will have at a given magnification.
From Telescopes 101…
*There are practical lower and upper limits of power for telescopes. These are determined by the laws of optics and the nature of the human eye. **As a rule of thumb, the maximum usable power is equal to 60 times the aperture of the telescope (in inches) under ideal conditions. *Powers higher than this usually give you a dim, lower contrast image. For example, the maximum power on a 60mm telescope (2.4" aperture) is 142x. As power increases, the sharpness and detail seen will be diminished. The higher powers are mainly used for lunar, planetary, and binary star observations.
So, this is where the “light bucket” comes in handy! NOW you can see some rings & moons around Saturn and Jupiter!
Looking for that comet this morning (some thin clouds apparently blocked it from my view), I got some awesome looks at both Mercury (very bright right now) and Saturn (both of which were just emerging from the morning twilight c. 10 degrees apart).
