Saturday 18 July 2009

Galileoscope update

OMFG. It works. It really does. I really have no clue about celestial objects. I can point out the moon and the sun and I can find the Southern Cross in a pinch but I'd be flat finding one of the planets. So we decided to point the telescope at the brightest star we can see from our balcony in Sydney. It was really bright and rose in the east. It took a while to figure out how to focus the telescope. There is a tube the eyepiece sits in that slides in and out and once I was able to get it to slide easily it was not long before I managed to get something in focus.

I sighted up the bright star and I was able to get a white blob in the middle of eyepiece. I pushed the tube in and the blob shrank down to a bright point that had 3 other little pin pricks of light above and below it. It was fracking Jupiter. Holy humping guinea pigs. Jupiter with three of its moon in sharp focus. I was giggling like a school girl. Michelle reckons it was just like the picture on the box.

The picture isn't mine, it is something I snagged from the web. Unfortunately I don't know who owns it and I would give credit if I could. I've rotated the picture 90 degrees so it looks pretty much what I could see through the telescope. Awesome. I'm still grinning like some grinning thing. Thank you Galileo. Thank you Phil the Bad Astronomer and thank you Galileoscope.

Saturn next. Well it would be if it wasn't in an ordinary position at this time of year unfortunately.

2 comments:

  1. Nice one! I can remember the same feeling when I bought a telescope a few years ago and pointed it to Jupiter. Just wait until you see Saturn!

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  2. Shit, even the moon was tops the other night. I dunno how it does it but it looks like a big object, almost like a moon, hanging there in space. Almost gives me vertigo. Very very cool.

    Need a bigger telescope.

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