Christmas astronomy - The Moon & Jupiter

Most people around the world were treated to a great view of a waxing moon paired with Jupiter this Christmas night. The astronomical event presented itself to be the best way to start using our newly acquired telescope!

The Moon was spectacular offering plenty of detail (although at this stage of it's cycle it's increased brightness reduces contrast), and Jupiter was clearly visible with it's majestic bands and four Galilean moons - Europa, Io, Ganymede and Callisto - And since none of us had seen Jupiter through a telescope before, we were all rather chuffed. 

Although we'd not yet received our astrophotography kit, we shivered through the sub-zero temperatures (a crisp -20 deg C)  here in Cedar Rapids, Iowa to grab a few shots through the eyepiece with our cellphone cameras. Granted the images are really low-quality, we're happy we got anything at all on our very first astronomy outing!

Beginning with the Moon - 

Using a cellphone camera our shot of Jupiter and its four Galilean moons couldn't obviously produce the detail we observed through the eyepiece. The image below is untouched and includes distortion due to the eyepiece barrel and the fact that we were trying to keep a cellphone centered at -25 degrees Celcius.

Attempting to clean up and re-size our original image gave us something a tad clearer (below).

Both the observed and captured image above were 'mirror reversed' since our telescope is a Schmidt-Cassegrain design. A comparison between a 'direct' view versus the captured view is shown below. The rendering is a screen capture from Sky & Telescopes' Jupiter's Moons applet available here. 

Note: E = Europa, I = Io, G = Ganymede, C = Callisto

From Sky & Telescope (SCT mirrored)

From Sky & Telescope (Direct view)

Equipment list: Celestron NexStar 6SE - Stock setup (25mm Plossl eyepiece and a wonky StarFinder) // Imaging - Samsung Galaxy S3

Who: Ayushi/Rajat/Kashif

When: 1830 hrs, 25th Dec, 2012

Merry Christmas!

Everyone.

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot, animated with love:

Farewell (at 5K in slow-motion)

From Cassini, in colour

Images through NASA Cassini's UV lens:

Source

Vanity.

From 'The Verge':

"NASA's original photo is somewhat obscured by a dust cover on the MAHLI camera used to capture the picture, but The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla made the necessary touchups to reveal the memorable portrait above. That large "eye" you're looking at is actually one of Curiosity's most vital tools: it's a powerful laser capable of vaporizing Mars rocks and instantly analyzing their chemical composition as they vanish from sight."

Source

"How long is a piece of string?"

A BBC Horizon documentary with Alan Davies (of QI: Quite Interesting fame) exploring the intricacies of measurement - from rulers to thought experiments and quantum mechanics.

Overall, the science and maths is a tad over simplified; I feel viewers could handle a little more detail.

Via