Sunday, October 21, 2012

Viewing the Night Sky

The night was chilly and a bit misty, but I was able to see a fairly round moon and several other stars. I was never really interested in the moon, but seeing it up close made me think otherwise. 


This is a picture of the moon taken with just my phone. It actually looks better than that, trust me.
Here are pictures taken with the telescope.


Pretty neat, huh? The Big Dipper was also visible that night, but it was too faint for my phone to capture an image of it. One of the astronomers showed us through the telescope the star Albireo. The speck of light we saw was actually two stars together, Albireo A and Albireo B, but the telescope cannot zoom far enough.

We were also lucky enough to see Neptune, the farthest planet from the Sun. It appeared as a tiny dot, however.

A very faint Triangulum galaxy can be seen through the telescope. Here's what the constellation looks like:




This is from a constellation book that the astronomers had supplied us. I flipped through the pages to find Leo, my horoscope sign.


The brightest stars in the constellation form an image of a lion, but I think it looks more like a dog. Oh well.

Anyway, I thought that the star gazing event was quite entertaining despite the cold temperature. One astronomer even gave us his Tumblr url: http://astrogeoguy.tumblr.com/. Have fun reading through astronomical posts!

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