Amateur astronomers/skygazers?

Anybody here have a telescope that they use for something other than spying on the neighbors? I took a few astronomy classes in college and really enjoyed them, and for many years I've had one of those JC Penney generic 3-inch telescopes, every now and again I'd take it out and go look at the four visible moons of Jupiter or the rings of Saturn and stuff like that.

This year, I decided to get into the hobby with a bit more gusto; an 8-inch Dobsonian telescope from Orion. It just showed up, and of course it's going to be raining tonight, but I'm eager to point that sucker skyward.

Ambient light is worse than unsprung rotating mass. Find a good spot with as little light as possible.

Stargazing is many times more fun when you have people to share it with.

Hi Scott,

Congratulations on your Orion acquisition…like yourself, I’m very interested in astronomy and studied it in college. I’ve only got a clapped out beater of a telescope but given that I live in the suburbs at about 900’ MSL, I really can’t justify upgrading it.

One consolation to not seeing the constellations (hey, I’m a poet) is that I’m directly under the Space Shuttles approach when it lands at Edwards AFB. When it landed about a month ago, I got treated to its unique double sonic boom that aggressively rattled my house and I was able to clearly make out its double delta shape with the naked eye.

One of the astronauts on board was returning from a long stint on the ISS and so, he was too weak to do much more than blog on the way in. His communications were time stamped to the second and he was saying useful stuff like “OK, we just now able to see the California coast line coming up”. I’ve got a laptop / wireless router set-up at home so I was able to walk around in my backyard getting communications from the Space Shuttle that were just seconds old while watching it blast overhead.

Some aspects of modern technology really suck…complication, lack of control, big brother, etc. but other aspects like the above are just fantastic.

Yeah, we get the double boom here in Daytona from time to time, if the conditions are just right; I was amazed that it carried so far. Our house has enough dark spots that gazing should be pretty good, particularly in the winter when it's not so damn hot and humid.

My Fiancee, Ashley, likes checking out the sky, too, and she's got some friends at Riddle who are real astronomers. I forsee a star party in the near future. I used to be pretty good at picking out constellations, gotta refresh my mental map of the stars...

The Subaru one is the Pleiades.

Scott Lear wrote: Yeah, we get the double boom here in Daytona from time to time, if the conditions are just right; I was amazed that it carried so far. Our house has enough dark spots that gazing should be pretty good, particularly in the winter when it's not so damn hot and humid.

Dark spots around the house are only okay. Surrounding ambient light from the civilization around you really changes how much more detail you can see in the sky.

The best I ever managed was at sea on a sailboat. The sky just looks different when there isn't even a sign of land. It's like... you can see why ancient people believed the sky was made of crystal spheres.

Where I grew up in Vermont had the best sky for stargazing that I've ever seen...that is, until they put in sodium lights up in Burlington, about 30 miles to our north. Still..the stargazing is stellar.

Salanis wrote: The best I ever managed was at sea on a sailboat. The sky just looks different when there isn't even a sign of land. It's like... you can see why ancient people believed the sky was made of crystal spheres.

You should join the Navy or the Marines. It's very surreal to be on the deck of a ship in the middle of the ocean at midnight. Ship regulations call for zero emitted light, so the flight deck is like...really really dark.
Although I don't imagine you could pack a decent telescope in a seabag.

I've got an 8" Celestron SCT that I don't get to use as much as I'd like.

Scott, you may want to try one of Orion's light pollution filters that thread onto an eyepiece. I've got the equivalents that thread into the back of my SCT, and they do help quite a bit.

There is a new house down the street from where my family just moved that has an observatory on the third floor (well, it is the third floor). It's pretty cool, but it's always full of bees.

After a couple hours of assembly and optical alignment, rather than go to bed I had to take it out for a very quick spin; after fitting a 25mm eyepiece and aligning the finder scope to the primary, I pointed at Orion and got a great view of the nebula; couldn't believe how crisp and stable the Dob was. Then I took a peek at the moon, the crater detail was amazing. It wasn't easy to to pack it up so shortly after heading out, but I had to get some shut eye.

Tonight I'm gonna ensure that I got the leveling procedure right and give the IntelliScope thing a try, I didn't even expect that particular component to be in the box, but Santa did me a solid this year. The aiming is still done by human power, but its like a nav system for a telescope.

Every time I look at the moon I want to go there. With a telescope, you can almost feel like you are there. And seeing it move through your view is pretty spectacular too. It's a giant rock vehicle floating through space at 17,000 miles per hour.

Question about the moon though: does it orbit about its own axis in such a way that the same part of it always faces Earth, regardless of where it is in our orbit? I think it does, and I understand what that would look like, but why does it do such a thing?

I believe it is because it's center of mass is very off it's physical center, so the heavy part always faces earth.

... there is no dark side of the moon really...

So sayeth the Floyd.

Yes, it rotates at the same speed it orbits, so we only ever get to see about 51 percent of the surface from earth during a year. I think I remember something from an astronomy class about it being slightly misshapen and having greater mass on the Earth-facing side, over millennia it kind of balanced out.

But just because we can't see the other side doesn't mean it's dark; when we get a new moon (dark to us), the other side is getting all the sunshine.

Ashley's teaching a class this semester on Sci-Fi and how it has influenced real science, the first book in the class is Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" and she's been reading it out loud to me whenever we drive somewhere. It's fascinating, funnier than I expected (in parts, anyway, some of the technical descriptions about artillery are funny in a different way, mostly because Tom Clancy is a Verne ripoff artist), and it conveys the sense of wonder people had about the moon back then. Damn kids these days, the moon is something that man visited long before they were born.

Margie wisely suggested that we head out to the Ocala forest some clear night and get away from all the ambient light. Stargazing is the perfect cheap date.

I miss such things. I was in astronomy club back in high school and i damn near could have tought the astronony class I took my first semester in college. Thankfully I live out in the sticks, so ambiant light is a non-issue as long as I turn off the out side light. But in the end i would like to get a nice 8 inch tellescope.

Back in the 60s, when every kid my age wanted to be an astronaut, we ate that stuff up. We learned about celestial physics and constellations because we wanted to, and not because we had to. .As I grew older, and space travel became more commonplace, the passion diminished, but I have always been awed every time I looked towards the stars.

They are beautiful, aren't they? (obscure MIB reference..)

The most beautiful night sky I have ever seen was from the Rockies. On the advice of some of the locals, we rode the dirt bikes up into the mountains outside of Silverton, shut them off and waited for our eyes to adjust then looked up. Amazing. The different colors of the stars are much more easily seen at higher altitudes. I gotta get my kid up there sometime.

I took an astronomy class in college, now about 15 years ago. Our professor also worked at the planetarium in Dayton, Ohio. One class was held there, and I think I learned much more there than in the classroom. We weren't forced to go during a public showing, so we had much more time to learn and discuss other things.

One cool thing was the Pink Floyd laser show that they teased us with. The following weekend, a bunch of us from college went, and I've been back a few times since. We were warned to go when sober, as it's easy to puke while watching the show.

Jensenman wrote: The most beautiful night sky I have ever seen was from the Rockies. On the advice of some of the locals, we rode the dirt bikes up into the mountains outside of Silverton, shut them off and waited for our eyes to adjust then looked up. Amazing. The different colors of the stars are much more easily seen at higher altitudes. I gotta get my kid up there sometime.

I want to go back there to visit. I went during the Durango wildfires, so we had very "cloudy" skies (to say the least). We stayed at Purgatory during the off-season.

We did rent Jeeps and drove over Ophir pass and into Telluride. That was awesome.

It would be nice of there weren't so much atmosphere between Daytona and the vacuum of space, but conditions on a cooler night are actually pretty good. Nothing like viewing stars in the mountains, where the Milky Way is a glowing band and you feel really, really small.

The night sky from the (nearly at sea level) Francis Marion National Forest is great as well, but like Scott says that thick air blanket does make a difference. Maybe it's just the exact spot where we were, but the night sky view from the western NC area was pretty disappointing.

confuZion3 wrote: It's a giant rock vehicle floating through space at 17,000 miles per hour.

Hi confuZion3,

FYI…17,000 mph is the velocity required to maintain a low earth orbit of 150 miles which is just high enough to stay safely outside of the atmosphere.

The further away from the earth you go, the less gravitational pull it exerts which reduces the orbit velocity. In the case of the moon which ranges from 238,000 to 242,000 miles (IIRC), the orbital velocity is just 2,300 miles per hour.

Other important velocities are:

Escape at 25,000 mph which is where (assuming no atmospheric resistance) a projectile shot from the earth’s surface would wonder off into space indefinitely.

Geosynchronous at 7,000 mph which is what you need to maintain an orbit at 22,223 miles…handy for weather & communication satellites as it allows you to hold a fixed position over the ground.

I started out with a 8" Dobsonian many years ago - and still have it. I also added a 13.1" Dobsonian for extra light-collecting power.

I got hooked on the deep-sky objects; galaxies, nebulae and globular star clusters are high on my list. Seeing something so tremendously huge and so fantastically far away intrigues me.

Light pollution is your worst enemy, though good filters can help a bit. But don't despair - even if you live in a relatively 'bright' location, there are plenty of objects to pull in. You can even pull in the brighter planets, like Jupiter and Venus, during the day.

After a bit of help from the online community with setting up the Intelliscope computer (taping the lower disc to the base helps prevent it from rotating and gives much more accurate readings), I we had clear enough skies last night that I was able to test drive it. I even found a spot that's not too far from my house but that has very few ambient lights.

My jaw dropped several times as I poked around the sky using the Intelliscope's Tour feature for the month of January. Some of the items were obvious, like the Orion nebula and the Pleiades, but a few others were totally un expected. A double cluster blew my freaking mind, and when I switched over to my 10mm eyepiece, the Beta Monocerotis triple star was beyond cool. I didn't believe my eyes that I was seeing three stars, I had to confirm it on Starry Night when I got home.

Can't wait till Jupiter and Saturn are back to friendly viewing times.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/01/13/space.spotlight/index.html

from the cnn.com front page today

Any recomendations on where to buy a decent reflector around $500? Walmart online has a few entery level items, and the only other place i could think to look is ebay, but I don't feel like taking that risk.

IIRC names like meade and celestron are good peices for what I'm looking at