After The Meeting...

Tonight was the monthly meeting of the Fox Valley Astronomical Society. An interesting meeting about Apollo 11's Moon landing 50 years ago. Part of the discussion was about the "where were you" stories. Some were deployed in Vietnam. I was a 15 year old working on my Grandparent's farm. It was a Sunday as I recall, so didn't have to do much work - I remember shooting hoops with my younger cousin. I think there is a photo somewhere. I also took photos off the TV of Armstrong and Aldrin with my Instamatic - was a space nerd even then!

After the meeting, my friend Mark was setting up the club's 12" Meade in the parking lot at Peck Farm Park where we met (shown at left). He asked if I'd seen Celestron's new cell adaptor, which quickly allows mounting of a cell camera to shoot through the telescope. I'd not seen it, but was quite impressed as it allowed 3-axis of motion - X, Y, and focusing motion too! Shown at right in their advertising, it would come in handy at the Grand Canyon as EVERYONE wants to take photos of what they see in the telescope...


Well, with the quarter-moon high in the west, it was a perfect opportunity to try it out. The only difficulty we had was in setting up and aligning the camera lens to the eyepiece in the dark. A little red light might have been handy, but we eventually found the light coming out of the eyepiece. A wide shot of the moon is shown at left. Note the bottom edge is clipped by the edge of the eyepiece, NOT the lower limb of the moon...

At left, with the addition of some digital zoom in the camera, more detailed close-up is shown. It was an impressive demonstration with the brightest thing we observe in the night sky!





A bit later we looked at Jupiter, and were easy to see and record the 4 Galilean moons. Shown at left, the overexposed disk of Jupiter is at center, and left-to-right are the moons Ganymede, Europa, with Io and Callisto on the right. I tried but was unable to reduce the exposure to more properly expose for bright Jupiter. A higher power might have helped, but I suspect there was too much black sky - not enough "bright" to trigger the auto-exposure... I would have stayed for Saturn, low in the SE, but the mosquitos had drunk enough of my blood, so moved on towards home to post these. All in all, I'm tempted to get one of these devices - looks like an easy way to at least document the moon and bright planets with a cellphone.