may seem brighter than they are
My landlord recently revived his hobby of astronomy. To this end, he shopped around last year and bought one of the higher-end state of the art reflective telescopes around.
If anyone has seen the stereotypical long brass tube that comprises the Gallilean telescope - well, modern day astronomy, even amateur astronomy, is now far far removed from this hoary image. Telescopes can be (and are) controlled automatically. They have motorized controls, they make minute automatic adjustments to compensate for everything (including the rotation of earth) and they also include automatic tracking software which enables alignment and automatic seeking of celestial objects in the sky.
In short, they’re extremely sophisticated pieces of kit. They also need a fair bit of non-trivial setting up. This is probably why we’re still using fairly powerful binoculars instead of the proper telescope - it has so many components to set up that the whole job takes ages.
A couple of days ago, he yelled upstairs and said that Jupiter was visible. This seemed sort of odd to me; I thought that Mars and Venus were the only planets visible to the naked eye. So I went downstairs and we booted up the laptop containing the software (not the telescope, just the tracking software) and had a peek. It was almost a full moon; so the brilliance of the planet next to the moon’s silvery light seemed even more astonishing. Yup. The software said it was Jupiter alright.
Which brings me neatly to apparent magnitude - the apparent brightness of objects as seen from earth. Turns out that Jupiter is actually the third brightest object in the sky; even if it is quite far away.
Learn something new every day.
On 04-Jul-07 at 2:21 am,
HNL wrote:
wha? you didn’t know that? you can even see the four major moons with a simple pair of binoculars… it’s actually the 4th brightest: sun, moon, venus, jupiter…
by the way, would you happen to know how much it cost your landlord and the mirror diameter?
On 04-Jul-07 at 11:49 am,
drac wrote:
Actually, it was fairly pricey - I think he paid around £1250 or so. But he did get another gadget that allows photography and a few other bits and bobs thrown in for the price.
I’m not entirely sure if this is what he got, but he was looking at this catalog - I think the 8” thing is about right.
And no, for some reason - I just knew about Venus, Mars and Sirius (the dog star). Weird.
On 05-Jul-07 at 3:46 pm,
HNL wrote:
whoa, a meade. i guess he’s really into it. tell him to forget the planets and go for nebulae and clusters. that’s where the real beauty is. i hear the orion nebula is nice this time of year…
On 05-Jul-07 at 5:49 pm,
drac wrote:
Oh, he doesn’t like the planets that much. Well, he’s obsessed with photographing “the perfect picture” of the rings of Saturn, but that’s about it. He’s more a cluster and distant galaxy guy, I think. You don’t really need a major telescope for the planets near Sol anyway.
He did think his purchase might be a little bit too advanced for his level though. The calibration and alignment steps seem awfully fiddly to me, but the control software is very very nice. The software still uses Win95 style controls and looks horrible though; but it’s quite functional.