Astronomy

I'm one of those casual astronomers who loves to look at books** about the planets, stars, galaxies, etc., but who know the names and locations of very few of the visible constellations.

**(and the internet! Try http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html for the astronomy picture of the day!)

One of my favorite activities is looking for the visible planets and the moon. I get great satisfaction being able to look where I expect to find something, and saying "Yep, there it is."

I've got a small telescope, a 4" reflecting telescope from Edmund Scientifics called the Astroscan. It's very nice for very casual observation of things like the moon and the nearby planets. I've seen Jupiter's cloud bands and the four Galilean moons, and Saturn's rings.

One day, I tried to capture the moon with my Kodak digital camera by holding it up to the eyepiece. There's a small red LED on the camera that reflected into the image in an interesting way. I'm sure that most most backyard photoastronomers would groan at the interference, but I thought the effect was very "arty."



Here's also some pix of Alex helping me observe the transit of Venus on the morning of June 8, 2004. I didn't have the Kodak then, so the pix are courtesy of the camera in my PalmPilot.




In the picture of the Sun, Venus is the little black dot near the edge in the vicinity of 11:30. We projected the Sun's image through the telescope onto the piece of paper that Alex is holding.

Also, there's this picture of the October 27, 2004 Lunar eclipse I took with my PalmPilot held up to the eyepiece of the telescope. Wasn't there a Sox game on that night? I was too busy looking at the moon to notice... Lots of yelling in the neighborhood...

Someday, I hope to have the equipment to take some pictures of Jupiter and Saturn. The cameras that I have can't connect directly to the telescope that I have, and so I'm very limited as to what I can attempt to photograph.

But still, I do find satisfaction in what I can accomplish right now, which is more than the early astronomers could. Galileo didn't have any cameras.