Telescope madness!

[Darius]

My old hobby caught up to me again - amateur astronomy I bought a telescope (a 5" apochromatic refractor along with a motorized GoTo equatorial mount and a set of eyepieces) and I'm enjoying views of planets, the Moon and brighter deep space objects from my balcony. Picking up another optical tube soon, a 12" Newtonian reflector, for fainter DSOs.

If you have any questions, shoot. Astronomy rocks

[shiram]

i never really had a telescope
i get my fixes from places like http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/

im not sure i could get much of anything from a telescope, living in a densely populated city.. smog and city lights

[Bane]

Always fun to have a hobby, but personally I would never have the patience for that.

I think these kind of pics are kinda cool though
Click me for pic

[Darius]

My nightsky ain't the best either but when I move from Downtown to Wilanow, it's gonna be a huge improvement in terms of seeing/light pollution. Currently, when seeing is good my sky is about mag 4-4.5 which means that with a naked eye I can only see the brightest stars + of course planets like Jupiter. However, already 15x70 binoculars enable me to see Jup's 4 largest moons and some bright DSOs like the Great Cluster M13 in Hercules.

As for the pics, from a dark site awesome, colorful photos are possible with amateur equipment (like my refractor + camera) but visual observation isn't even close. Color on planets is more muted and details less pronounced than most "pro" pics taken from spacecraft you can see around the www. Observing DSOs is mostly observing faint, black & white fuzzies You can only expect traces of color in case of the brightest nebular objects like M42, and only in really big scopes (10" to 16", depending on seeing/LP).

Still, it's a fascinating hobby.

If you consider that from a decently dark site, you can see M31, the famous galaxy in Andromeda with your bare eyes, and that the light you see is more than 2 million years old, it puts you into a new perspective

[Hylandor]

You need to bust that baby out on October 9th. Two spacecrafts will be touching down on the moon.

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009 ... ?list27315

[Darius]

I'd love to but I won't be able to watch it, unfortunately. Two reasons: (1) I'm in Europe, (2) my scope is probably too small, and I haven't bought the larger baby yet

[Bane]

Dunno if you care, but I found this site and maybe it can be cool for those of you who cares:
http://www.wikisky.org/

[Darius]

Very cool site indeed I also love Stellarium, free software that simulates the nightsky in real time depending on observing spot coordinates.

I visited an old friend last night. He lives in a fairly remote district of Warsaw where light pollution is relatively low. When I left his place around midnight, I couldn't resist staring at the sky for a few good minutes before I got in the car. Orion in its full glory, with the clearly orange/reddish Betelgeuse and the M42 nebula easily visible without any optical gear. Mars was also quite spectacular, even deeper colored than the giant star. Sirius already visible as well, albeit still relatively low above the horizon, and thus twinkling. Good that I'm moving out of downtown so soon

[Bane]

Never was one for staring up into the skies and the only star(s) I can identify is the.. damn, dunno the english word for it and can't find it in a quick google search either :-/ Well, I mean the one which looks like a cart, 4 stars is the cart and three stars make the handle.

Haha, I prolly sounded kinda uneducated right there

[Kadian]

Sounds like the big dipper to me...

[Darius]

Yeah, in Polish it's the Big Cart (or Big Wagon), and in English it's the Big Dipper. It's actually only an asterism, not a constellation, since it's a part of the Great Bear or Ursa Major.

If you wanna test your eyesight, look at the second star in the handle, Mizar. It has a relatively faint companion, Alcor. If seeing is OK, even from the city you can split them without even binoculars. Mizar itself is a "real" (physically connected) double star as well but in order to split Mizar A from Mizar B, you need a telescope.

BTW, the most spectacular star in the Orion constellation, the orange hued Betelgeuse (left and up from the belt) is a red supergiant that could explode as a supernova literally any day now. "Any day" in astronomical terms means roughly 10k years but if it happens during our lifetime (which in fact means - if it already did, since Betelgeuse is around 640 LY from the Earth), it's gonna be a hell of a show to watch. It would be clearly visible even during the day, and about as luminous as the Moon.

[Bane]

BTW, the most spectacular star in the Orion constellation, the orange hued Betelgeuse (left and up from the belt) is a red supergiant that could explode as a supernova literally any day now. "Any day" in astronomical terms means roughly 10k years but if it happens during our lifetime (which in fact means - if it already did, since Betelgeuse is around 640 LY from the Earth), it's gonna be a hell of a show to watch. It would be clearly visible even during the day, and about as luminous as the Moon.

I'm not really into all this, but that I would lik to see!