After I took the camera off the tripod we set up our spotting scope, which works OK as a telescope. We observed the moon through that for a bit, and then Libby went looking for Saturn. She found it! We could clearly see the rings sticking out on either side of the gas giant. Through the scope it was a beautiful clear star with two sticks on either side. We like to imagine it was something like what Galileo saw.
Regulus was also very clear just above the moon, and this is a great time to see the closest star visible in the Northern Hemisphere. Sirius is the brightest star in the south. You can use Orion's belt as a pointer - it's just straight off and a little below it (at least around 8:00).
4 comments:
Did you take a picture of Saturn? Post it man! We were too cloudy to see anything.
No, our zoom couldn't pick up Saturn with the camera alone , and I'm sure I couldn't hand-hold the camera to digiscope it at the necessary shutter-speed.
I wish I could have, though, that would have been cool.
Nice! That beats our eclipse picture (taken as it was ending): http://www.flickr.com/photos/technomancy/2283507829/
Thanks, Phil. I put it on the tripod and set the timer to avoid jiggling it when I pressed the shutter release. That helped, but our tripod is imperfect, so there was still a little movement. It didn't help that I was standing on the balcony walkway and that moves if people walk nearby.
I also set it on shutter speed priority and the speed was like 1.3 seconds.
I had five that were super blurry and got deleted.
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