Saturday, August 15, 2009

Jupiter at Opposition


A friend of mine was having problems with his new telescope. It's a 70mmm Meade refractor on an alt az mount. He said that he couldn't get anything in focus. Well, as it turned out he was right. If you placed the eyepiece in the scope without a diagonal, and seated it completely, you couldn't focus back far enough. The answer was to pull the eyepiece back about 1/2 way then tighten the screws. The picture above was taken through the 70mm using a web cam. As you can see it works just fine.

And since Jupiter is at opposition, I thought I'd hook the camera to my 8" Celestar. I'd never tried imaging Jupiter with this telescope. I was a bit shocked at the result.