Chunky Milk wrote:
Have you taken many other photos of planets? Also what is the coolest thing you've seen so far?
It's a shame, but photos are generally terrible. There is so little light available to take photos with, it's always hard to do, right off the bat. The glorious huge images you might see on the internet, often take weeks or months to take and are composite mosaics from dozens or hundreds of long exposure pictures.
There are some mathematical tricks one can employ of video footage of stars to increase image intensity as well, but it's like everything else, the more you fake mathemtically the less you are really in touch with your subject. So astronomy is primarily fairly personal and it's just me, the moment, the optics and and the sky.
For my money, the
thing I ever saw was a satellite that wasn't the ISS. It was a total random, I was trying to aim my scope at Jupiter and I saw something moving very quickly in a weird direction, I hadn't locked down the scope so it was free to move in all directions and I was on the lowest power magnification I have for it (25x), so the widest field of view (maybe 60 arcminutes, 1/6 of a degree) so I was able to keep the satellite in my view until it winked out.
Now satellite orbits >are< known, tracked and publically accessible, however do to the varying sizes and geometry of satellites I have yet to find anybody that actually has viewing times listed for satellites, so seeing one even with a Satellite Orbit app is damm hard and I saw one as a random. So cool.
The only satellites I have times for are the ISS and Iridium Flares. Both of which are cool party tricks to pull on people, particularly kids, because Iridium Flares look like shooting stars and it's super easy to convince a kid you control the shooting stars if you know an Iridium Flare is due in a few seconds time.
The ISS is visually impressive, but whenever I see it I am always disappointed because it is and represents so much more than it appears to be. To the naked eye it is a large orange dot travelling west to east, and would cover the whole sky in about 5 minutes, though I don't think it's possible to cover the whole sky. It appears at "angle x" above the horizon by magic, progress towards the East for "y seconds" and disapears at "angle z" above the horizon. The reason for this is that it is not a light source, it's reflecting light from the sun down to you. It is only about 200km above you, so the Earth is huge blocking the sunlight a lot of the time. So the ISS has to leave the shadow of the earth to catch light to reflect at you and disappears if it enters the earth shadow. This is why the ISS appears and disappears by magic above you. I suppose it is possible for it to rise or set like a moon, but I've never seen that and I bet it's impossible it could do both, unless you're at the North or South pole maybe, hell it might be visible 6 months at a time at extreme latitudes like those Swedish Winters.. hmm... never thought about this... anyway, it's an awesome yet disappointing sight.
Other "cool" things. Everything is cool when you see it the first time of course, but here's some things that made me feel stupid when I saw/learned it.
1. Jupiter.
Visible with the naked eye, I had no idea. I think it's the 3rd brightest celestial object, the order would be something like Sun, Moon, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, ISS but such a list would not be fixed as it would matter more about time of year and other objects positions and a local supernova could outshine all of them albeit somewhat briefly.
But Jupiter has dominated the spring night sky. My binoculars are 10x50, which means 10x magnification with 50mm lenses. Through these, Jupiters moons are visible. Jupiters has like 69 moons or something, you can't see all of them, but through my binoculars I can pretty much expect to see 2 to 5 of them. They move a lot, so on any given evening, the moon pattern is always different.
Through my scope, I can expect to see about 3 to 8 moons and some of the extremely distant ones too. Many visible moons are close to jupiter (durrr... they catch more jupiter light being there!) but some are "way the fuck off all the way over there" which through the scope looks like a moon being "20 jupiters away from jupiter" where most moons are visible within "5 jupiters of jupiter"
So I grew up on stories of the Greeks and there Jovian god names and blew them off mostly, but now I know that even with their primitive optics they could have recognised the planets as "wtf are these? these are definitely not like the rest of the stars" I suppose why not call them all Gods. But it made me feel stupid to learn just how ridiculously easy it is to look at the night sky through simple optics and pick out things that are so obviously unlike the other things up there. Even with no details revealed through binoculars, planets are so obviously not stars after one has spent 60 seconds looking at them. Star do not magnify at all. Even at 1000x mag power, but planets do, even at 10x mag power.
2. Orion Nebula.
Winter in the UK gets the constellation Orion, which for my money is the most recognisable constellation anywhere. With Betelgeuse, Rigel and (outside the constellation but close by) Sirius as three super bright stars all close in, it makes navigating through a telescope super easy. Normally with no super bright stars, through the scope all stars look very similar indeed, so it's hard to track down a pinpoint position, hence the use of a spotter scope. But Orion is easy to navigate around. Anyway, the sword on Orions belt contains M42, The Orion Nebula.
You can actually see it with the naked eye, but it's so faint and fuzzy you don't really know you can. Through my binoculars it looks like a white smear and through my scope it looks like angel wings.
It's easy to find and easy to get a scope onto, probably the most usefully easily accessible galactic object around.
3. Andromeda.
I've not yet seen Andromeda, so I will only say this. It's the next nearest galaxy. As an object in the sky it occupies as much of your field of view as six of our moon, but is so dim you can barely see it. Yeah, you read that right. It's huge, but you can't see it.
Only you can see it, in the very darkest places you can get to, it is visible to naked eye. Not much point in using magnification to see it, it's huge. What you need is a big light bucket. My 50mm binoculars have yet to reveal it to me and consequently I've not been able to point my telescope at it because I don't know which direction it's in. Yes I know which direction the books and apps say it's in, but I've not found it yet.
4. The moon is too bright.
The moon is too bright.
It hurts to look at it through optics, so filtering is needed. But better yet, look at quarter moons. As the terminus line (from light to dark) is towards the edge of the sphere it creates a line of depth relief on craters, revealing to your eyes information about their height. A full moon doesn't do this. Sure the details are impressive through the scope, but the depth dimension a partially eclipse moon produces is where the fuck more impressive. Actually... I also own a Nikon Coolpix P900, so you get pictures to demonstrate this.
(The P900 you should look up, it's fucking frightening, where ever you go in the world, somebody might be pointing of these at you from a mile away and you'd never know)
Full moon semi boring
dem fucking craters!
Anyway, I was holding that camera in my hand, not on a tripod and I get images like that. Goddam P900... and it's only going to get worse. Check out some youtube videos of the damm thing to see what I mean.
