Astrophotography

It looked like clear skies last night so I thought I would drag out the telescope and have a look.  When it's this cold you need to let it sit outsite for a while so that the mirror temperature equalizes with the 

ambient temperature otherwise the image will be fuzzy due the thermal currents swirling around the surface.

Here's the telescope parked out in front of the house.  You can read more about it here on my website.

This thing that is mounted to the top of the telescope is the Telrad finder. Aiming the telescope is done by looking down the body of the telescope through the Telrad where you will see a series of red circles in the form of a bullseye...

...like this.  You point the telescope and place the object you want to view in the centre circle, in this case a bright object in the southern sky which just happens...

... to be Jupiter!  You can see the bands quite clearly but I assure you the view in real time is much better.  The point and shoot camera I was using can not capture the whole picture because the planet is much brighter than it's moons.  To the eye it would look more like...

...this.  This is done by making a composite of at least two pictures so that both the moons and the planet can be captured.   Lots of fun!