First-time jitters

by Sarah E. Jones

Growing up in a small town didn't give me a whole lot of opportunities to observe...

In fact, though I've been obsessed with astronomy since I realized I could look up at night, I've never looked through a telescope!

So tonight, my father-in-law took down his 'old' Infinity 11EQ-D reflecting scope. We've set it out, and though I know the light pollution will be disgustingly irritating, I'm going to do some back-yard observing for the first time.

To my absolute horror, he cannot find his eyepieces. There's one in the box, but I'm not sure what exactly it's for. Hopefully, we'll find some by tomorrow night since I'd like to make it up to Montebello (perhaps with Gary in tow, and my fiance Brandon... Hope I don't make it too crowded...).

Any suggestions for this particular scope? I know observing is mostly learned through osmosis, so I'm looking forward to irritating and bothering the heck out of you guys so I can leach all the information from your brains for my own evil use. Please, though, throw rocks at me if I'm too bad, really.

Crossing my fingers, Sarah E.

*update*

Well, for a newbie, I think I did pretty well. I had a hard time at first, since my sight didn't match up with the scope and I didn't have a moon to align it with. I noticed a "bright light" and hadn't printed out a star map for that area since I didn't think I'd be able to see anything of interest to the west since I had a huge house in the way.

I focused (eventually) on the light after about fifteen minutes of losing it over and over and over again. Turns out, it was Jupiter! Well, hey, whaddyaknow? I saw four moons and just a bit of planetary detail, but with just one eyepiece, I was only able to get a tiny view.

I knew for a fact that Saturn was off by Gemini, which is one of the handful of constellations I know by sight, so I spent half an hour trying to get that one focused. I used Jupiter to align my site, though with the planet moving out of my view everytime I had the sight aligned it was exasperating.

Eventually saw Saturn, very exciting for my first observation. We have virtually no other areas of the sky we are able to see in the backyard, since trees block just about every other view. I can't wait to head out to Montebello and have more options!

Posted on sf-bay-tac Apr 18, 2006 10:15:59 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.4 Apr 18, 2006 17:18:24 PT