We recently were in darker skies in upstate South Carolina. I was able to get everything setup and ready to go. The biggest challenge of the night was my overall lack of knowledge of the night sky.
Years ago I took an astronomy class in college where I memorized all the constellations and was quizzed on them in the planetarium. It is one of those unfortunate things where after years of non-use the learned information has faded though may still be in my head somewhere. I am sure there also is a translation gap having learned the constellations in the planetarium and looking at the night sky is definitely different.
So, my current approach is to use an app on my phone to point my phone around the night sky and see what is where and try to find something to point the telescope to.
While better than nothing, this approach definitely has limitations. It is difficult to try to line up the telescope with what my phone is pointing at. As my refractor is fairly long it is not super difficult to guess the general direction it is point to. The phone though is more of a challenge to try and figure out the exact angle it is pointing at. Additionally, the app didn’t seem to work great all the time. There were a few times where something was messing up and the entire night sky was shifted from reality and it would stay that way for 30-60 seconds as I moved it around the night sky, then it would suddenly jump back into place. This definitely added to the challenge for someone who is not an expert at the night sky, when the tool I am using to try to help navigate was sometimes giving me incorrect information.
The success of the night was Saturn. I was able to get the telescope pointed at Saturn, keep it centered and focused, while moving to higher magnification eyepieces. Saturn’s rings at this time were completely flat across the center of Saturn. It was hard to make out any surface detail on the planet. The rings definitely make Saturn such an iconic, standout target. I was very happy to be able to see it. Family members were also excited to see it.
I tried to find the Andromeda galaxy but did not have luck. In the app, you could very roughly see where it was, but I had a hard time translating that to the telescope. I used a very wide field of view eyepiece, hoping I could find it, but had no luck.
Another downside with the app is there is such a huge amount of stuff labelled and shown, far more than I can actually see. The relative brightness of things is also not to scale with the app. I wish the app had a function (or there was another app) that was kind of more like “help me find 5 things that would be good to try and see with my 80mm telescope right now”. I do not know if such an app exists.
Overall, seeing Saturn made the night a success and I was very happy to prove to myself that I could get everything setup and working and that everything seemed to work.
Leave a Reply