Planet Up

With Mars long gone for the year and Venus being super bright but relatively boring and now gone as well it's great to have Jupiter up in the sky early enough to start seeing well at the stargazes, which will be moving to 9PM next week.

Tonight we'll have a pretty close conjunction of the Full Moon and Jupiter which combined with some mild weather should really bring some folks out to the stargaze. 

Meade MWA 10mm Eyepiece

Meade MWA 10mm Eyepiece

New Eyepiece

With Jupiter becoming better placed for viewing each night for the next few months and Saturn to follow mid-summer I decided to get a new high magnification eyepiece that was also easy for people to look into so I bought another one of the Meade MWA (Mega Wide Angle) series eyepieces, this time the 10mm version which is a 1.25" barrel.

With my new long focal length scopes this eyepiece will yield 160x to 180x. Add my 2x barlow lens and we're up into 320x to 360x which is a lot more than I ever really used with my previous scope so I'm anxious to see if the image holds up well under that amount of magnification.

It will also be interesting to see the difference between the 8" Astrograph scope which I'll have out tonight and the 16" Newtonian which I plan to bring out on Thursday since the moon will be out of the sky.

Photo Op

I haven't really been doing much with astro-photography lately but since I'll have the photo capable telescope and mount out tonight I think I'll do some more R & D with auto guiding and perhaps try and get some shots of Jupiter which will be my first attempt at a planet with the new scope and new camera.

If I can get some good steady Jupiter shots (been really windy here the last couple weeks) I'll also get a chance to try out some new image stacking software I ran across but I'll have to make sure I shoot the raw photos in a format it can handle. Note to self: check that before leaving! LOL