Feeling very small while seeing Saturn Mars and Jupiter for the 1st time in my own telescope

[simon56modder]

I saw that today was a pretty good deal : clear sky, the moon, Saturn, Mars and Jupiter so I decided to take my telescope out from the dust.

I already saw the moon in my telescope a long time ago, but this was the only body I've ever seen in my telescope (even if I've already seen Saturn through someone else's one), and for the first time in my life (and in the same evening) I've seen Jupiter, Mars and Saturn (+ the moon but it wasn't the first time)

what I felt was excitement, I was very happy to have the opportunity of being able to live such a beautiful moment, so I wanted to share this and know if anybody else has ever seen a planet/the moon/something else and what it felt like

 

Details on what I've seen

I first targeted the moon to set the telescope up again and I was already impressed ! Even if it wasn't the first time I've seen it, seeing the craters is very thrilling !

I then targeted Jupiter. I'm using Sky Map on my tablet to find the planets I wanna see. So I found Jupiter, I pointed the telescope towards it and I saw a bright white disk with 4 small points next to the disk (Galilean satellites guys !!!)

Next step was Mars : I was a bit disappointed with Mars because I couldn't distinguish Mars' red color... but it appeared bigger than Jupiter.

And finally I pointed towards Saturn. I was reeeally impressed by it. I understood why Galileo wasn't able to understand the shape of its rings

 

Edited July 15, 2016 by simon56modder
pics

[UmbralRaptor]

Nifty, especially the visible phase angle for Mars(!).

 

Out of curiosity, what sort of telescope and eyepieces are you using? It should be possible to see 2 bands (maybe more) on Jupiter, and both Saturn's Cassini division and Titan under good seeing. (colored filters may help with band details)

Edited July 12, 2016 by UmbralRaptor

[cubinator]

I was very little when I first saw Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon. It was pretty cool and I was hooked! Now I like to take my telescope out often, and look at the stars and planets. I'd like to catch a color-contrast binary star sometime, but never got around to it. Any suggestions? I'll be out in an area with very little light pollution in a couple of weeks, at the lunar minimum, so the stars will be pretty neat and I'll have a small telescope, a 4" reflector.

[tater]

I got a small refractor as a kid, and it made me internalize something that I knew intellectually, but had not yet felt in my gut---that I was standing on a tiny ball in the middle of a vast ocean of stars.

[cubinator]

1 minute ago, tater said:

I got a small refractor as a kid, and it made me internalize something that I knew intellectually, but had not yet felt in my gut---that I was standing on a tiny ball in the middle of a vast ocean of stars.

Spaaaaaaaace!

[ProtoJeb21]

I had been able to point out the planets in the sky, but I never saw one through a telescope until 2012. That planet was Jupiter. Here's a list of when I saw each planet through a telescope:

-Moon: 2008?

-Jupiter: 2012

-Venus: 2013

-Saturn: 2014

-Mercury: Spring 2015

-Neptune: Summer 2015

-Mars: Spring 2016

-HAT-P-22b: June 2016

 

(HAT-P-22b counts, right guys?)

[HoloYolo]

I wish my telescoped worked. I'm jealous of what you guys see.

[SuperFastJellyfish]

I bought my first telescope back somewhere around 2006, an 8" Orion dobsonian.  I collimated it during the day and then in the evening my cousin said something along the lines of 'that star is bright let's check that one out.'  It turned out to be Saturn, and we were blown away.  I mean you see pictures of these objects, but when you can see them with your own eyes...it's just incredible!  I've been hooked ever since. 

My main scope now is a Celestron Nexstar 8SE(bought in 2011).  The goto mount is just so easy.  Star hopping manually is cool and all, but being able to just pick a target on the handset and letting the scope slew to it all on its own is just magical.  It opens up so many objects per time spent viewing.  It's completely worth it.

I'm planning on getting an H-alpha solar scope sometime soon.  Looking at stars that are light years away is great, but why not be able to check out the closest one?  

Edit:  I recommend Stellarium, Skyportal, and 'Where is Io' for phone/pc apps.

Edit2:  My eyepieces are a Baader Zoom 8mm-24mm(amazing btw),an 8mm & 17mm Orion Stratus, and the 25mm plossl that came with the Nexstar 8.  Oh, and a crappy 2x barlow that came with my first telescope. 

Edited July 13, 2016 by SuperFastJellyfish

[lugge]

2 hours ago, SuperFastJellyfish said:

 I mean you see pictures of these objects, but when you can see them with your own eyes...it's just incredible!  I've been hooked ever since.

Forgive my silly question, but what can one expect to see in detail?

I owned a telescope as a kid, but I was just pointing at stars randomly, didn't know anything about the sky... Since then I was talking to some guys who where dissapointed with their telescope... they expected some fancy pictures like you are used to from wikipedia :/

[kurja]

What you seen in terms of detail depends entirely on your scope, and viewing conditions. A 40€ F10 refractor can show the main cloud bands on jupiter with no fine detail, plus the largest moons as dots. Scale up from that as much as your wallet permits ,)

 

Edit - which is why I prefer a camera, they're just so much more efficient than our eyes. It's not quite the same ofc but a close next best thing imho, and since I already have a camera anyway... My way of avoiding an unwieldy and expensive big telescope see my profile pic, that's with a 300/4.5 50€ camera lens. Naturally a tracking mount and image data processing skills required.

Edited July 13, 2016 by kurja

[YNM]

Almost on every first observation of any object I hope it'd be better than what's there. Two exceptions though - Saturn and Jupiter. Probably including the Moon, but now I feel bad for those people who are excited by the full moon, which IMHO is featureless...

Though, now knowing the amazing science that could be gathered just by those bleak images, I'm always excited by anything that I can get into the view.

And yes, for galaxies you better grab a camera and get a long exposure for certain results. Some people can see better though, so your mileage may vary

[Green Baron]

7 hours ago, HoloYolo said:

I wish my telescoped worked. I'm jealous of what you guys see.

What's wrong ?

[simon56modder]

9 hours ago, UmbralRaptor said:

Nifty, especially the visible phase angle for Mars(!).

 

Out of curiosity, what sort of telescope and eyepieces are you using? It should be possible to see 2 bands (maybe more) on Jupiter, and both Saturn's Cassini division and Titan under good seeing. (colored filters may help with band details)

AstroProfessional telescope (diam 114 mm, focal length 900 mm) using "K9" or "K20" eyepieces. I used no filters 'cause the only one I have is for full moon observation. I saw a bright dot next to Saturn, do you think it could be Titan ? I was also able to distinguish Jupiter's bands !

 

3 hours ago, lugge said:

Forgive my silly question, but what can one expect to see in detail?

I owned a telescope as a kid, but I was just pointing at stars randomly, didn't know anything about the sky... Since then I was talking to some guys who where dissapointed with their telescope... they expected some fancy pictures like you are used to from wikipedia :/

This is what people around me also say, but personally I feel excitement much more than disappointment

[UmbralRaptor]

18 hours ago, cubinator said:

I was very little when I first saw Jupiter, Saturn, and the Moon. It was pretty cool and I was hooked! Now I like to take my telescope out often, and look at the stars and planets. I'd like to catch a color-contrast binary star sometime, but never got around to it. Any suggestions? I'll be out in an area with very little light pollution in a couple of weeks, at the lunar minimum, so the stars will be pretty neat and I'll have a small telescope, a 4" reflector.

If you're out in a dark site, I'd skip the binaries and go for globular clusters (say, M4, M5,  M13, M22, M92), open clusters (eg: M6, M7, M25, M29, fake ones like Cr399), nebulae (eg: M57, M27, M8, M20/21), and maybe a galaxy or two if they're in a favorable position. (eg: M81/M82)

 

8 hours ago, simon56modder said:

AstroProfessional telescope (diam 114 mm, focal length 900 mm) using "K9" or "K20" eyepieces. I used no filters 'cause the only one I have is for full moon observation. I saw a bright dot next to Saturn, do you think it could be Titan ? I was also able to distinguish Jupiter's bands !

 

This is what people around me also say, but personally I feel excitement much more than disappointment

There's a good chance that it's Titan. I Iike Moons of Saturn and Moons of Jupiter for tracking the moon locations.

The scope itself sounds like a fairly common small Newtonian form factor (~4.5", ~f/8) and reasonably capable. The eyepieces are pretty meh (kellnors, probably 0.965"/24.5 mm diameter), but as long as you can see things it doesn't matter much. If it can use 1.25" eyepieces and you have a budget, I'd be tempted to pick up a ~30 mm plössl to make finding things easier and maybe a 4-7 mm of some sort for planetary/lunar/double star views.

 

16 hours ago, HoloYolo said:

I wish my telescoped worked. I'm jealous of what you guys see.

How is it broken? We can do some troubleshooting and/or point you to places with more info (eg: Cloudy Nights)

 

10 hours ago, kurja said:

What you seen in terms of detail depends entirely on your scope, and viewing conditions. A 40€ F10 refractor can show the main cloud bands on jupiter with no fine detail, plus the largest moons as dots. Scale up from that as much as your wallet permits ,)

 

Edit - which is why I prefer a camera, they're just so much more efficient than our eyes. It's not quite the same ofc but a close next best thing imho, and since I already have a camera anyway... My way of avoiding an unwieldy and expensive big telescope see my profile pic, that's with a 300/4.5 50€ camera lens. Naturally a tracking mount and image data processing skills required.

Eh, astrophotography is at least an order of magnitude more expensive. $400 can get you an 8" dob and some accessories with careful shopping(All hail the Zhummel Z8!) This seems far less budget breaking that putting at least a kilobuck each into a large apo, a mount, a DSLR, and Photoshop. Throw in a fifth kilobuck if you're like me and all your computer hardware is scavenged/would need to grab a recent macpro to run the image editing software.

Edited July 13, 2016 by UmbralRaptor

[cubinator]

45 minutes ago, UmbralRaptor said:

If you're out in a dark site, I'd skip the binaries and go for globular clusters (say, M4, M5,  M13, M22, M92), open clusters (eg: M6, M7, M25, M29, fake ones like Cr399), nebulae (eg: M57, M27, M8, M20/21), and maybe a galaxy or two if they're in a favorable position. (eg: M81/M82)

Why not both?   I've seen Andromeda in that telescope, but I'm not incredibly familiar with the summer sky so I have trouble finding constellations, plus the fact that there are so many more stars than what I can ever see at home. I have a phone app that I would use, but I'll have to get one of those extra dark filter apps to use it and still be able to see those magnitude 6 or 7 objects. I'll be there five days, so I'll look at a bunch of stuff. Globular clusters are not something I'd thought of, thanks for the idea!

[kurja]

2 hours ago, UmbralRaptor said:

 

Eh, astrophotography is at least an order of magnitude more expensive. $400 can get you an 8" dob and some accessories with careful shopping(All hail the Zhummel Z8!) This seems far less budget breaking that putting at least a kilobuck each into a large apo, a mount, a DSLR, and Photoshop. Throw in a fifth kilobuck if you're like me and all your computer hardware is scavenged/would need to grab a recent macpro to run the image editing software.

Like anything, it can be expensive if you want to make it that way but you can do much with little. If one already has an ok camera (any dslr or such) about a 100€ for a simple tracking mechanism will bring you nice detail in many galaxies. Also, photoshop is like the last thing anyone should need for astrophoto (never used it for this), calibration and integration are readily achieved with other (free) software. Which I run on my ancient intel core cpu desktop. Ofc if one wants to spend the money, there are plenty of options out there, and a dslr isn't the thing to go for in that case anyway.

Like I said the m33 in my profile pic is with an old 300mm fl camera lens. I doubt you could visually see that much detail with an 8" reflector.

[kiwi1960]

Well, I have two things against me in a thread like this... bad eyesight and living in New Zealand...

We are next to the South Pole so the Moon is never that large to begin with.

BUT... I saw the craters with my telescope and I was blown away. I never bother with the other planets because of my bad eyesight.

So I agree with the OP and all the others... seeing the Craters of the Moon is spectacular.

 

[Snark]

10 minutes ago, kiwi1960 said:

We are next to the South Pole so the Moon is never that large to begin with.

Pedantic nitpicking relegated to spoiler section because it's not really on the main topic.

Spoiler

Well, the Moon's going to be pretty much the same apparent size regardless of where you are on Earth.  It's a quarter-million miles away, and the difference between seeing-it-from-the-equator and seeing-it-from-the-pole is only 4,000 miles, or less than 2% of the total distance; visually insignificant, you'd need a pretty good instrument to tell the difference.

Besides, NZ's not that close to the pole.  It covers a latitude range from around 34 to 47 degrees, if I'm reading the map correctly-- i.e. comparable to the continental US.  So even if one could somehow visually distinguish a 2% size variation... the moon would appear to be same size seen from NZ as from the US.

(Sorry, couldn't help myself.)

But nitpicking notwithstanding, this,

18 minutes ago, kiwi1960 said:

I saw the craters with my telescope and I was blown away.

^ this right here. 

The first time I ever saw the Moon through a telescope was over 35 years ago, and I still remember the moment.  It was a cheap 3" reflector, nothing fancy, but the sight of the Moon's craters and mountains was breathtaking.  I've been a space nerd ever since.

[UmbralRaptor]

35 minutes ago, kurja said:

Like anything, it can be expensive if you want to make it that way but you can do much with little. If one already has an ok camera (any dslr or such) about a 100€ for a simple tracking mechanism will bring you nice detail in many galaxies. Also, photoshop is like the last thing anyone should need for astrophoto (never used it for this), calibration and integration are readily achieved with other (free) software. Which I run on my ancient intel core cpu desktop. Ofc if one wants to spend the money, there are plenty of options out there, and a dslr isn't the thing to go for in that case anyway.

Like I said the m33 in my profile pic is with an old 300mm fl camera lens. I doubt you could visually see that much detail with an 8" reflector.

Okay, how? Especially given that a "decent" DSLR is likely out of the price range. And, well, attempting to image the moon and starfields on a P&S is rather frustrating. (I really should take a shot at M31 at some point to demonstrate the pointlessness of trying astrophotography with a low end camera)

 

14 minutes ago, kiwi1960 said:

Well, I have two things against me in a thread like this... bad eyesight and living in New Zealand...

You get the Magellanic clouds, Omega Centauri, 47 Tucanae, and better views of the Sagittarius/Scorpius objects than the northern hemisphere!

That said, the crescent/first/last quarter moon through a telescope never gets old.

[kiwi1960]

18 minutes ago, Snark said:

 

  Hide contents

Well, the Moon's going to be pretty much the same apparent size regardless of where you are on Earth.  It's a quarter-million miles away, and the difference between seeing-it-from-the-equator and seeing-it-from-the-pole is only 4,000 miles, or less than 2% of the total distance; visually insignificant, you'd need a pretty good instrument to tell the difference.

Besides, NZ's not that close to the pole.  It covers a latitude range from around 34 to 47 degrees, if I'm reading the map correctly-- i.e. comparable to the continental US.  So even if one could somehow visually distinguish a 2% size variation... the moon would appear to be same size seen from NZ as from the US.

 

Not really... those at the equator will get a better view... also, we sort of get a distorted view of it due to the amount of atmosphere we view it through.

here, we are near the South Pole

Its not always like that, but it means the Moon is always .... smaller... here. I'm always amazed that the Moon is so big in the Movies... The atmosphere acts like a magnifying glass near the equator.

Edited July 13, 2016 by kiwi1960

[1greywind]

Well, I must tell you about my recent experience about Jupiter observation: As long time KSP player I'm used to think about planets "normal" orientation in relation to Sun (or Kerbol) equatorial plane. And looking on Jupiter's belts of clouds in 30 cm telescope, I suddenly felt that I'm staying on side of Earth heavily inclined to "zero" plane of Solar system - this feeling was very strong and surprisingly vivid - most of time I think about Earth's surface as "zero" plane, but display of Jupiter's disk with clouds belt visible suddenly switched my internal reference plane to "real world map view".

[Snark]

22 minutes ago, kiwi1960 said:

Not really... those at the equator will get a better view..

They might get a slightly clearer view if the moon happens to be directly overhead, due to having less atmosphere to see through.  But it wouldn't be any particularly larger.  I don't know where in NZ you are, but even in the worst-case scenario that you're at the southern tip of the South Island in midwinter, you're only about 2500 miles farther from the Moon than someone standing on the equator:  i.e. only a 1% difference.  That's a negligible difference, invisibly tiny.

And in any case, you're getting basically the same experience that people in the US get (other than US summer being NZ winter and vice versa); same latitude range.

30 minutes ago, kiwi1960 said:

I'm always amazed that the Moon is so big in the Movies...

Me too, but it's because of photography, not geography.  They make it look big because they like it that way.  There are various ways to do this, either with just out-and-out special effects, or else just playing some games with perspective (e.g. take telephoto lens shots when the moon is close to the horizon).  When you see the Moon looking big in a movie, it's simply because "that's how it looks in movies", not "that's how it looks to everyone outside NZ."

Besides, it's not as though most movies are filmed on the equator.  Hollywood's at approximately the same latitude as Auckland.

34 minutes ago, kiwi1960 said:

The atmosphere acts like a magnifying glass near the equator.

Citation please?  I don't believe this to be the case.  Aside from making no scientific sense that I can see, it contradicts my personal experience; I've seen the moon from the equator, and I've seen it from 60 degrees latitude, and frankly it looks exactly the same regardless of where on earth I see it from.  (Which is what the math says.)

[cubinator]

1 hour ago, Snark said:

and frankly it looks exactly the same regardless of where on earth I see it from. 

...except it's upside down in NZ. Unless the atmosphere now acts like a spherical lens too?  

[kiwi1960]

1 hour ago, Snark said:

They might get a slightly clearer view if the moon happens to be directly overhead, due to having less atmosphere to see through.  But it wouldn't be any particularly larger.  I don't know where in NZ you are, but even in the worst-case scenario that you're at the southern tip of the South Island in midwinter, you're only about 2500 miles farther from the Moon than someone standing on the equator:  i.e. only a 1% difference.  That's a negligible difference, invisibly tiny.

And in any case, you're getting basically the same experience that people in the US get (other than US summer being NZ winter and vice versa); same latitude range.

Me too, but it's because of photography, not geography.  They make it look big because they like it that way.  There are various ways to do this, either with just out-and-out special effects, or else just playing some games with perspective (e.g. take telephoto lens shots when the moon is close to the horizon).  When you see the Moon looking big in a movie, it's simply because "that's how it looks in movies", not "that's how it looks to everyone outside NZ."

Besides, it's not as though most movies are filmed on the equator.  Hollywood's at approximately the same latitude as Auckland.

Citation please?  I don't believe this to be the case.  Aside from making no scientific sense that I can see, it contradicts my personal experience; I've seen the moon from the equator, and I've seen it from 60 degrees latitude, and frankly it looks exactly the same regardless of where on earth I see it from.  (Which is what the math says.)

Optical illusion... but I still stand by my observation....

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/13/why-does-the-moon-look-so-huge-on-the-horizon/#.V4bVhpex9p-

[Snark]

43 minutes ago, kiwi1960 said:

Optical illusion... but I still stand by my observation....

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/13/why-does-the-moon-look-so-huge-on-the-horizon/#.V4bVhpex9p-

Well, sure it looks bigger on the horizon; it's a common optical illusion, a psychological effect of perspective.  But that happens regardless of whether you're in Auckland or Stockholm or Singapore.

And if we grant that the moon's more likely to be near the horizon if you're "near the poles"... that would argue that it looks bigger there, because of that illusion.