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If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

(OP)
Even with our light-pollution here in SoCal, I was clearly able to see both Jupiter and Saturn tonight from my backyard. Using a 45X spotting scope I could easily see Jupiter plus at least four of its Moons. But the real show tonight is Saturn. It's in opposition to the sun (as is pretty much Jupiter as well) so it's very bright. It's also at about its closet approach to Earth (which will be the case for the next couple of months) but what really makes it look great is that it's tipped toward the Earth at about the steepest angle ever achieved, meaning that you can see its rings in all their glory.

I've taken some pictures of both Jupiter and Saturn and am going to try and get some better shots later tonight of at least Saturn as it moves higher in the sky where it will be brighter, as long as the sky stays clear. I'll post my shots tomorrow.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

G'day John,

I'm no astronomer, but my wife and I do have a tripod-mounted spotting scope we use for bird watching; what ascension above the horizon, what azimuth, and what UTC or GMT to locate these heavenly wonders?

CR

"As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." [Proverbs 27:17, NIV]

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

(OP)
According to my "Star Walk" app on my iPad, Saturn will rise at 7:48PM (PDT) tonight and set at 5:53AM (PDT) and it gives an elevation of 34˚. The "Star Walk" app works like a planetarium (as long as you're connected to the net, in my case, via our home's WiFi) showing the night sky and the locations of such celestial objects as the constellations, planets, major stars as well as significant satellites, including the ISS (International Space Station). As I said, since Saturn, and to a lessor extent Jupiter, are now in opposition to the Sun, they follow basically the same path across the sky as the Sun does, only about 12 hours later. I'll post my pictures soon.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

We live out in the country, and are on v-e-r-y s-l-o-w d-i-a-l-u-p, so no Wi-Fi, not to mention we don't have an iPad either...but hopefully the numbers you provided will be enough to help us find them both.

Thanks much!

CR

"As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." [Proverbs 27:17, NIV]

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

Saturn and Jupiter are now the brightest "stars" in the sky, so are easy to spot. I live far from any city, so on any clear night I clearly see the Milky Way. I see meteors and satellites almost every night; it is just a matter of how long I bother to look up at the sky.

A really amazing App for a smart phone is SkyEye. It provides star maps which align with the direction you point your phone. It is a great way to learn the stars and constellations.

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

(OP)
OK, here are my pictures from last night. Note that these were all taken with a Sony a6000 mirrorless camera with an image resolution of 24MP. I used a 400mm preset lens (equivalent to 600mm on a 35mm SLR) set at f11.0 and shot at ISO 100.

The first image is of Jupiter and at least four moons (you may not be able to see them on your screen but looking at the original image I can see them). Note that none of these images are full-frame but rather have been cropped so as to magnify the image to where you can see the subject matter (note that these images, as you see them here, are about what it looked like when I was looking through that 45X spotting scope).

The exposure time on this image was 0.3 seconds. Now of course the image of Jupiter itself is washed-out as I had to use that exposure in order to capture an image of the Jovian Moons, but that means that all detail from the planet was lost.



Now this is also a shot of Jupiter, but this time I changed the exposure so that I got a better image of the planet itself, in this case I left the aperture set at f11.0 but changed the shutter speed to 1/30 of a second (if you look close, you can actually see some hint of detail of the planet's surface with its streaks of gases).



And here is the best photo I was able to be get of Saturn. This was shot still using f11.0 but a speed of 1/20 of a second. Of course, being that Saturn is both smaller than Jupiter and further away, it appears as a smaller object in the sky.



Anyway, I hope you enjoy the pics...

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

Another nice app is "Stellarium". Works on Windows, Linux; it is free and there is also the portable (USB stick based) version. Once installed, no internet access is necessary to use it.

http://www.stellarium.org/en/

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

Nice pics, JohnR! And gearguru, you're talkin' my language... bigsmile

CR

"As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another." [Proverbs 27:17, NIV]

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

Our astronomy club (Central Valley Astronomers, www.cvafresno.org) is now in full swing with summer star parties, most of which are open to the public. Your local astronomy club is probably keeping pace with our schedule, and if they're a large club they are probably outpacing us. If you really want to SEE the Moon and Jupiter and Saturn and their moons, find out if your local astronomy club is hosting any public events (similar to what I describe below).

Tomorrow night my wife and I and some other club members are bringing telescopes to the Sunset Point Day Use Area next to the campground on the north shore of Millerton Lake just NE of Fresno, CA. We have been doing three public star parties each summer at Millerton for about ten years. Jupiter and Saturn will be the show stoppers, but with binary stars, open star clusters, globular star clusters, planetary nebula, diffuse nebula, galaxies, even a modest comet, we never run out of stuff to show the public. There is even a 12th magnitude quasar about 2.0 billion light years away that is within reach from this site with my 8" scope.

Next week is our regular monthly star party at Eastman Lake in Madera County, although some of us may head to the Big Stump parking lot in Kings Canyon National Park to escape the Valley heat and murky air. The skies at 6500 feet are so much better than the skies at 600 feet.

Two weeks from now is our monthly "sidewalk astronomy" event at River Park Shopping Center in north Fresno. Shopping centers are terrible for general astronomy, but planets and the first quarter moon are more than enough for the several hundred people we entertain each month (our record is an estimated 1000 people on one night last year).

I mention all this to reinforce my suggestion that if you don't have a telescope, look up and hook up with your local astronomy club. Amateur astronomy melds science, beauty, and gadgets (and more gadgets) into a great hobby.

==========
"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

Well done with the photos, John!
I'm looking at an overcast sky tonight...

STF

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

Hitch a ride on JUNO instead:

https://vimeo.com/219993811

STF

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

I noticed at 4:30A this morning that Venus was absolutely cranking! Piercingly bright and completely unmissable in the eastern sky. Large too. Easily the brightest thing you will ever see in the sky sans the Sun and the Moon.

Jupiter is the brightest thing in the midnite sky at the moment. It's about slightly down in to the south from straight overhead and at midnite is slightly towards the west. Easy to find naked-eye with mediocre vision. Saturn is about a quarter of the sky back towards the east following Jupiter. Saturn looks quite reddish right now. It is only a little brighter than the big reddish star Antares which is almost in line with Saturn and Jupiter. To determine if it is Antares all you need to do is see if it is the tie-point to the three stars in an arc forming the top of Scorpius constellation.



Note the big red Antares. Saturn is currently to the immediate left of Antares about... 20 degrees.

Keith Cress
kcress - http://www.flaminsystems.com

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

If I ever see a big red S in the night sky I'm going to quit sniffing glue.

----------------------------------------

The Help for this program was created in Windows Help format, which depends on a feature that isn't included in this version of Windows.

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

Since we are on the topic of astronomy, this is a moonshot from about 5 years ago.

God made the integers, all else is the work of man. - Leopold Kroenecker

RE: If your night sky is clear, you need to do some Star, or should I say Planet, gazing...

Up where I am "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" due to the wildfires in Canada.

Not good for night viewing right now, and probably not until some time next week...

Looked at some of the facebook posts of the devastation taken by a drone...

Mike McCann, PE, SE (WA)


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