This will be a list of objects, i hope.

M31

M34

Well, the night sky at the moment is plum full of action! Saturn's reign is coming to an end as it is setting around midnight. However, as it leaves us for quite some time, it has brought in just about all the rest. Jupiter is rising along with Neptune around 12:15 and shortly behind them, about an hour later, Uranus. Mars, Venus, and the moon complete the picture at 3:15am. What a party!

Ricardo and I were out from 11pm to 4am friday night (and saturday morning) and caught a lot of the action. Neptune was the only planet that proved too elusive for imaging with the relatively small 5" aperture of the telescope. No worries though, at almost 4.5 trillon km (2.7 miles), 30 times further from the sun than earth, i'm sure you'll all forgive me. As for the others, enjoy! We'll work our way, in ascending order of coolness.

I'm pretty psyched that I've now caught a glimpse of all the planets but Mercury. In addition to seeing so many planets, we also got visits from three different police officers scoping the area! Two were interested enough to sneak a peak of Jupiter.

Uranus

(~3 trillion km away!)

Link to video

Venus

Link to video

Mars

Link to video

Jupiter

Link to video...read more

Last night, after resetting the Autostar controller to faculty defaults, my scope can now track objects in the sky automatically! This has made using more powerful eyepieces a possibility. Tracking Saturn by manually controlling the motors has been difficult. As soon as you take your eye off the planet to swap out an eyepiece, the planet disappears and finding it again is challenging, especially when decreasing the field of view dramatically with more powerful eyepieces.

Here is a picture of Saturn with using a 2x barlow lens in front of the webcam. Image has been adjusted for exposure.

(click here for source video)

So, a couple months ago, I got my first telescope, a 125mm (5") Meade ETX-125. I was fortunate enough to find one used on craigslist and thrilled to get such a nice scope for my first!

With the exception of a couple fluke warm days, I haven't been able to use it much. And for those of you in California, I don't want to hear about it! Yes, I know...it's cold here but at least the skies are clear and clean. ;-) Anyway, in the past couple days, I've been able to take some better shots of the moon and Saturn and thought I'd post them. And as long as you haven't ever opened a book or done an image search online, you'll think these pictures are impressive.

Moon, March 8th, 2009. (click image for more info/detail)

Saturn, April 8th, 2009. (click image for more info/detail and here for source video)

Saturn and its biggest moon, Titan, April 7th, 2009. (click image for more info)

 As the weather gets warmer and I get a better feel for what I'm doing, I'll post some better pictures.

This is sort of a rhetorical question but here goes, does it pay to search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)?

Of course it pays, what an amazing discovery it would be to find a signal from another world, right? What could be a bigger game-changer in human existence when/if we do find intelligent (or any life) out there? Imagine the implications in our thought, education, policies, and religion! I'm anything but an expert but I do think there is some validity in the famous Drake Equation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation) which is basically the statistical likelihood based on many values placed into an equation to life existing somewhere else in our galaxy.

Wouldn't we have to be rather egotistical to believe the we're the only "ones" out there? Based on the principle of mediocrity, there is nothing THAT special about earth, that is, unless you include specific religious faiths. If we take a step back though, and just examine actual evidence, there are clear-cut reasons we have life on earth; orbiting within the "habitable zone" of our star, being the biggest reason. Plate tectonics being another which gives the earth recycling properties that assist in temperature regulation. Still others, our atmosphere and magnetosphere. There are ~300 billion stars in our galaxy and it is widely accepted that there are close to the same number of galaxies. If we are fair, we won't multiply those numbers together to get an idea of how many planets could have life. Most galaxies aren't as big as our Milky Way, most planets don't lie in the habitable zone of their stars, etc. Regardless though, we're talking about a number (sextillion) with 21 zeros after it. Given those numbers, it is hard to believe there isn't some other forms life out there. Great, we just need to find it. Well, now the real problems arise....read more