First Time on Telescope

This memorial day long weekend was surely going to be miserable-and-in-turn-memorable for me. I didn't preplan anything and the last minute plans of hiking in Joshua National Park got shelved. So I presumed it was gonna be really boring weekend.

But looking at weather conditions, I decided to buy a telescope from the local frys store. I got a 3.1 inch f/9 refractor, Galileo FS-720. Its surely not a high end equipment... expensive than my estimate.. but still good enough for a beginner.

The obvious choice for observation was moon. Sight of moon was indeed fabulous through 24mm eyepiece. My 10x60 binocs has surely given me a good look at moon before, but at 25-50x zoom with a telescope stabilized on a tripod, opened new doors to lunar-heaven. I was able to see various marias, craters like Copernicus, Plato, Pythos, Eratosthenes, Kepler, Tycho etc. Increasing the magnification till 100x revealed finer details on Tycho and Copernicus. Dilip and Ranga were watching moon through telescope for first time and I was able to see their excitement while they were looking through the eyepiece.

Saturn was also a good catch. I have seen it before through 6 and 22inch reflectors, but wasn't sure how it will look like through 3inch. It wasn't that difficult to spot. Through 24mm eyepiece, saturn rings were not easy enough to observe, but 10mm eyepiece revealed the rings clearly. I was able to see the gap between the planet and the rings easily. Infact Saturn's largest moon Titan was also visible at 4'clock position from Saturn. In an effort to keep Saturn within the high magnification view with my manual tripod, I wasn't able to observe it in full detail. Any way better luck next time..

Watching Venus was okay. I was able to see its phase.. green tinge at the edge of Venus is surely a puzzle to resolve. Mizar-Alcor double in Ursa Major was also good to watch.

Any way, handling the telescope first time in my life, is indeed a memorable experience and has surely made my long weekend really short :)