Scopes!

[Destructionator XV]

I bought myself a telescope last week along with a microscope and a bunch of other sciencey stuff, and have been spamming up as many threads as I can talking about it.

The most exciting stuff so far has been the telescope, so that's what I'll blab about first.


I've been getting cloudblocked almost every night since the telescope arrived. Last night though, the clouds cleared up, and I had to be up late anyway, so I took it out.

And despite forgetting to grab my high magnification eyepiece, it was fantastic. I haven't really seen the stars for a long time. My god, the sky is full of them. Even with a few city lights around me, it was still awesome, and just about anywhere I pointed the telescope, even more came through.


But, since I didn't have the high mag eyepiece, I wanted to look at something closer, that I might be able to make out some detail on in low mag.

Mercury: below the horizon.
Venus: below the horizon.
Moon: below the horizon.
Mars: below the horizon.
Jupiter: bright, high, and getting higher as the night goes on!


Helm, set a course for Jupiter. Engage!

gah, I didn't have batteries either, so I had to do it all by eye and hand. (the telescope, when given a million batteries, can point itself at things in the sky on demand. way cool)

Wasn't hard though, Jupiter was, by far, the brightest thing in the sky for me last night, and high enough that trees and lights weren't much in the way either.



Pointed up there, focused... and there's the bright disc, barely big enough to see little variation in it, and 4 semi-bright dots all formed up in a line around it.


Jupiter apparently has moons! The really cool thing is I could even guesstimate their distance from the planet too: Io was to the left of it, and visibly the closest one. The other three were to the right and their angular distance was roughly proportional to the accepted values. (my own measurement trying to guess Jupiter's diameter and then distance to the moons was off by about a factor of 3 though. I'm a newb.) Still, so cool.

and they were all aligned meaning i will flame someone for paying me late. again. in the coming days. How did the moons of Jupiter know my check was late again? Astrology is totally legit.



Anywho I'm excited to head out again. Hopefully the clouds will stay away for a while! My house isn't the best view location (lots of trees and city lights) but I've gotten some good stuff from it already (though last night I was at my friend's house, which has fewer trees and lights. Won't be there again at night for a while tho).

With the high mag eyepiece in hand, I'm hoping to make out the weather bands on that big planet.


Just super exciting. So far it has cost me ~$400 and I picked up a filter, another lens, and an AC adapter last night, totalling it to $500 for the astronomy scopes. Completely worth it.

Science is for weiners!

[Destructionator XV]

This is fucking cool.

Last night, Io was on top of Jupiter. Tonight, I was looking at the big planet again from my front porch (through the high mag lens this time!).

And Io was below it! The internet confirms to me it goes around Jupiter every 1.7 days.

It is sooooo cool being able to see that for myself.

Oh, and the weather strips? Yeah, they do show up now! Man, I can't wait for the moon to be out in one of these angles.

I'm going to try to measure Jupiter's mass over the next few nights.


Science is for weiners!

[Destructionator XV]

So I was just bathing and shaving and, as is typical with the latter activity, I cut myself.

This time though, I got excited and grabbed a microscope slide! I collected a sample of my blood and put it under the microscope.

Man, pretty boss. (I almost wish I sprung for the extra $100 to get the models with a built in digital camera so I could show y'all too. But I have better zoom for lower price so I win. I can always do an add-on camera accessory for the telescope later. Not sure if something like that is available for the microscope.)

So anyway, on low mag, it looked like red dots. I went all the way up to 1000x and got pretty decent focus (for the first time) - it looked good. I could make the individual cells flowing around!

No real details of the cells though, not tonight at least.


My blood sample looked fairly uniform; I guess I'm not horribly infected by anything.

I looked at one of my hairs yesterday. Generally smooth, but the one strand looked to have multiple strands, and a few microscopic imperfections.

The next thing I plan to look at in the microscope is a water sample from the tap. I don't expect to see anything special there, but I'll look anyway! I'll probably do it tomorrow.

Science is for weiners!

[Destructionator XV]

Another useful thing the digital camera accessories would do is make it a lot easier to measure things in the scopes.

Last night, I eyeballed the distance from Jupiter to Io in the telescope. To do it, I imagined picking up Jupiter's image and copy/pasting it, end to end, starting at Jupiter's center and stoping when I got to Io.

I eyeballed it at about 2.5x Jupiters.

There's two problems with this method:

a) How big is Jupiter itself? My best way do determine it (didn't do it last night) would be to imagine copy/pasting Jupiter all the way across the field of view. Then I could take the full field of view and divide it by that number to get Jupiter's angular size.

(after angular size, getting distance from the sun would be done by measuring its year length - would take a long time for me to do myself! And then I use the angles and the distances to determine its actual diameter. Even doing it this way is cheating a bit compared to ancient astronomers. I could draw out a map of the solar system and use existing knowledge of gravity that they wouldn't have. But at least it isn't as much cheating as just looking up the numbers!)

b) It was imprecise. The further something is, the harder it will be to eyeball. Even here, my measurement was about 20% off of the right answer.



With a digital camera attachment, I could have snapped a picture and then either printed it out and measured with a ruler or loaded it in the image editor and counted pixels. Either way would give much more precision than just eyeballing it!

Still not sure it's worth an added $100 though. I've spent quite a bit already. Besides, old time astronomers didn't have digital cameras either, and they did ok. I'll have to figure something out!