I bought a telescope yesterday! It is a Meade 70AZ-A, a 70mm refractor with a 600mm focal length (f/8.5). I got it for $70 from Woodland Hills Telescope (the brick-and-mortar version). They were pretty busy when I was there, but they're nice and have a good camera/photo department as well.
The telescope came with 25mm (24x) and 9mm (67x) eyepieces, as well as a 2x Barlow (which increases magnification by 2x). The 5x24 viewfinder is rather jankily attached; I have yet to figure out how to make it point in the same direction as the main tube. The mount in general isn't very solid or smooth, but at $70, I'd rather be paying for a crappy tripod with mediocre optics than the other way around. There are some loose bolts still; maybe it'll be a little better after I've tightened things down.
Anyways, it works! Here is a photo of the moon taken with my iPhone through the 25mm eyepiece (24x):
I also saw Jupiter and its moons, which was pretty amazing. It was only a few days ago that I learned (from a friend with the Google Sky app, which I'd highly recommend getting; alas, it's not available for the iPhone so I got Starmap instead, which is okay, I guess) that this particularly bright dot is in fact a planet, and now I've independently verified the existence of the Galilean moons.
At 133x, you can make out the stripes on Jupiter, which I think is pretty incredible. I thought you needed a flyby or a space telescope to see that sort of thing. I wasn't able to get a picture, though. It's really hard to line up the iPhone with the eyepiece (iPiece?) correctly. It's a lot easier with the moon because it's so bright that you can tell when you're getting close, even if the camera is completely out of focus.
Anyways, pretty exciting!
No comments:
Post a Comment