My first sighting of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot was tonight!

It was clear outside last night, so I spent some time trying to get a better picture of Jupiter. The results are decent:

I also got an image of M37, a cluster in Auriga. It looks way too dark on my CRT but ok on my laptop’s LCD. So be forewarned that it may be appear black 🙂

I took quite a few pictures of the moon, they can be seen here. All pictures taken with my old scope have been moved into a sub-album.
Here’s one of them.

This is made up of some 150 images, then the brightness adjusted in photoshop. Let me know what you think! Be sure to check out the full size image.

So that’s my first attempt of using my new telescope with a webcam. That image is made up of 20+ ‘stacked’ frames of recorded video. There are a couple more like it of Saturn here but they aren’t much to look at since I just used default values in the stacking software for all the features I didn’t understand.

For those interested, here’s what I was able to see on the first night out with the new telescope.

I’m just in from taking my new telescope out for its first light. Wow is it ever impressive. With the 4.5″ reflector I have, whenever I pushed the image up to 200x it almost always came out blurry and very dim. Quite the opposite with the 8″ – they’re extremly bright and sharp. I’ll be writing up a summary of things I looked at this evening and post a link sometime tomorrow.

My dad stopped by for a while to check out the view, so I gave him a quick tour of Saturn, the Pleiades, Orion Nebula, and the double Castor. After he left my neighbor was out on his deck and we ended up chatting for a while. I offered him the chance to look through the telescope and he seemed very excited but was busy at the moment. He said he’d definitely take me up on the offer another time he sees me out.

Well, time to get to bed. I’m glad I was able to get outside tonight, it’s supposed to be cloudy for the next few days

My new telescope has arrived! Pictures can be seen here. It took a little over 3 hours to get all setup and the mirrors aligned from its apparently bumpy ride across country, but it’s awesome! I’m about to take it out now and get the finder scope aligned and take it for a test drive. Note me holding my old telescope in one of those pictures. Yeah, this one’s big

I ordered my new telescope yesterday, the Orion SkyView Pro 8″ Reflector. I was planning on ordering in a week or two but they had a nice 10% off sale that was too hard to pass up. This will be a vast improvement over my current beginner’s scope which is only 4.5″ in diameter. Needless to say, I’m excited.