Tag Archives: telescope

All, Observations, Sketches

I finally found M13 and the Milky Way

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A sketch of Messier 13 (M13)

Tonight, I set out to go to a dark site alone at the Long Sault Conservation Area in Clarington, Ontario. I was there scouting the area last night. I brought my gear with me, but it was too cloudy last night. Tonight, was humid with patches of fog, and below average seeing, but the center of the sky was clear enough.

I left 30 minutes after sunset and the site was 20 minutes away, so by the time I was setting up my equipment, it was almost pitch black.

Milky Way Galaxy: I looked up at the sky and found that there was haze near the horizon. And then, what I thought was a strip of haze across the middle of the sky… was actually the Milky Way. Wow! This was the first time I have laid eyes on it! It was spectacular! There were so many stars, I was disoriented at first and didn’t know where the constellations were.

This was my chance to see if I needed to upgrade my telescope! So I aimed my Telrad at the spot where I knew M13 was supposed to be, looked into my eyepiece and… BAM! There it was! I couldn’t believe it! It was a dark circular patch of dim stars!

M13: Out goes my sketching kit and I started sketching away. As the sketching session wore on, my observation skills improved. I started using averted vision and I noticed more fainter stars that ended up in my sketch. I have attached my first sketch of M13.

M31: After that, I aimed at M31 and BAM! There it was: the Andromeda Galaxy and off to the left is what looks like a smaller faint object. But my goal tonight was to sketch M13 only so I just observed it.

So in the end, I really did “upgrade” my telescope just by driving 20 minutes away. This is my most successful outing so far and it wasn’t even a good seeing night. I am really enjoying hunting and sketching. Clear skies!

All, Observations

My Second Night Out with my Discovery 8 EQ

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My Discovery 8 EQ

I’m a newbie amateur astronomer from Oshawa, ON (Canada). Tonight, I setup my Discovery 8″ EQ reflector in the middle of an open field in my neighbourhood 200 feet away from the nearest street light. I also used this chance to align my finder. With my limited knowledge of the skies, I was able to observe:

Venus: It was so close to the rooftops by the time I was ready to view it. It was so small and so bright that it was hard to see the disk. It seemed like it was better through my refractor.

Saturn: It was bigger than Venus and sharper in medium magnification. It seemed the same through my refractor. At higher magnification, it got blurry that I thought there was dust in my eyepiece so I took it out and blew at both sides of the lens. Bad newbie move. It fogged up.

Moon: This was the first time I looked at the moon through a telescope ever, and my first reaction was saying “holy f***” in the middle of the field. As I continued to increase the magnification using different eyepieces, I was amazed at the detail. I saw a crater in the middle of a crater! I began to wonder how big these craters were and how could meteors hit the near side of the moon yet missing Earth! I began to wonder how the dark side might be even worse! Then within 3 minutes, my eye began to hurt, so I put on the tube cover and removed the 2 small hole covers to reduce the intensity, but it didn’t help much.

Then I scanned the summer triangle, looking for the one that is supposed to be a double star. I couldn’t find it.

In total, it was 20 mins for setup and tear down, and an hour of observing. I’m loving this new hobby. Now if I can find someone else in my neighbourhood with experience to join me in darker skies, that would be even better so that I don’t look like a creep in the middle of our field. Signing out!

All, Observations

My First Telescope: Meade 90mm Goto Refractor

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Meade 90mm Goto Telescope

I bought my first telescope today off Kijiji. It was a Meade 90mm Goto Refractor. I’ve always been a fan of astronomy and I watched a lot of astronomy documentaries, but I had no clue where to begin with telescopes. So I scoured the web for telescope basics, how to choose a telescope, and a few telescope reviews. I concluded that my first telescope would be a refractor, and my original budget was $100 for a used scope. So I went a little over my budget and paid $130 for this one, and it was brand new. Not bad.

The telescope had a 90mm aperture and a dew shield. It came with 5 Meade “MA” eyepieces ranging in focal lengths from 24 mm to 6 mm. The tripod came with a built-in tray that conveniently folded along with the legs without it having to be disassembled first. The computer had a control keypad that connected via a telephone coil.

Setup was simple enough that it only took me 30 mins to set it up. The red dot finder was also easy to setup. As with any new telescope gear, it is a well known fact that there will be clouds on the first night of your purchase. However, tonight, I got lucky.

I set it up in my backyard and went through the initial 2-star alignment. It was supposed to orient itself to the nearest bright star. My problem was that I didn’t know what the names of the stars were. So I was lost. At the end of the setup procedure, I followed the tour, but each object was not in the field of view. And whenever something was in it, I didn’t know if it was the correct object. The only recognizable object would have been Saturn, but it was too low that the houses next door were blocking the view.

I just ended up manually slewing the scope using the controller. I was amazed at how may more stars I could see. I even saw a double star, and a couple of satellites passing through the field of view. Overall, the feeling was good. Somehow, something got triggered inside me to continue along this path of amateur astronomy. More to come.