The first time I consciously saw Jupiter was when Curiosity was about to land on Mars, in the summer of 2012. Jupiter was only a bright point in the sky, me not having a scope back then. I tried my 7x60 on Jupiter, but it was not a good experience.
Later, in the summer of 2013, I trained my 76/700 on Jupiter during the triple conjunction, but conditions were not good, the scope bad, my eyepiece collection very limited and the sky too bright. It was early evening and Jupiter was vanishing to the other side of the Sun (or rather, the Earth was venturing on the wrong side of the Sun) – so it'll be some time until I'll get my next, proper, chance at Jupiter.
And tonight at about half an hour before midnight it went something like this: It's a full Moon, and the haze from the valley rolls in, and there is a haze up above and the conditions for viewing the celestial sphere are abysmal. But there are two points of light in the East, clearly visible with the naked eye (one twinkling like mad, one not). I go and look them up in Cartes Du Ciel: One is
So I dismantle everything, collapse the tripod, and be done with it. And of course, five minutes later I take a look again: And the conditions have improved slightly again. So I feel stupid for not even trying to look at Jupiter. So again, I pull out the legs, and hoist the 150/750 Newton scope on the mount, and adjust the weights, and get my PL40mm, adjust the scope by sighting along the tube and take a first look through the eyepiece: It's out of focus, spider and secondary obstruction visible and all. So I adjust the focus and lo and behold, it is a disc! A disc! How cool is that! So I go through my eyepieces, I see two moons, but the viewing conditions are not good (and the window pane does the rest to hamper it all).
But I have seen Jupiter's disc, and the next time conditions will be better (and I will be outside, I promise!).
No comments:
Post a Comment