Eyes on Eyepieces

Pleasant Evening

Modern cameras produce beautiful astronomical images. They reveal much more than the eye alone can see. But it's still wonderful to see celestial sights through a telescope with your own eyes. It's especially wonderful when you see things for the first time! We had a rare, cloud free night on June 3rd, and my bright young friend, Luisa, came to share some astronomical observing time with my Stellarvue 130mm refractor.

After overcoming initial telescope/mount pointing problems we settled down for more than two hours of fun. We attached eyepieces instead of cameras and decided to look at a sample of celestial wonders.

We saw six globular clusters: M13, M92, M12, M10, M5, and M4.

We saw six attractive double stars: Mizar, Albireo, Cor Caroli, Epsilon Lyrae, Acrab, and Algieba.

We saw the galaxy pair M81/M82, just capturing both in one field of view.

Open cluster M11 looked great, and the Ring Nebula M57 was spectacular.

The Swan Nebula, M17, showed some glowing gas, but only a hint of glow was apparent in the Lagoon Nebula, M8.

Louisa wanted to see how individual bright stars appeared through the telescope, so we looked at Vega, Spica, and Regulus. I also showed her the dim, but very red carbon star, T Lyrae.

By about 11:30 Jupiter had risen above the murky horizon. Luisa loved seeing Jovian moons arrayed beside Jupiter. I placed my phone on the eyepiece to grab the quick low quality picture of Jupiter shown below.

Jupiter is greatly overexposed, but you can see three moons beside the giant planet. Callisto is the moon on the bottom left. Europa is the moon closest to Jupiter on the right, and Ganymede is the remaining moon in the upper right. (The fourth Galilean moon, Io, was out of sight behind Jupiter.) The small dim object in line between Europa and Ganymede is actually a 9th magnitude background star called HD156182 which just happened to be aligned with the moons' orbital plane. Cloud bands on Jupiter were clearly visible to our eyes, but the phone camera wasn't smart enough to simultaneously capture both bright Jupiter and its relatively dimmer moons.

Saturn and its rings were near the horizon and showed a pleasing yellowish color in the eyepiece.

The telescope gave nice views, but we also saw some interesting naked eye events. The International Space Station passed over twice. Luisa saw a meteor streak across the sky. We also saw a tumbling satellite alternating in brightness as it traveled across constellations.

Eventually, some hazy clouds began appearing, and we were both getting tired after midnight. After the equipment was brought inside our exciting night was not quite finished. As I drove Luisa home at 1:00 am we passed hundreds of deer feeding along the roadsides, including one young buck who stood calmly in the middle of the highway blocking our way. I was astounded by the number of deer and glowing eyeballs reflecting our headlights! I drove well below the speed limit to avoid hitting them.

Luisa will soon return to Brazil. Farewell, Luisa! I'll miss you.