My Night Under the Stars
Hey Space Placers! Last night, 1/15-16, I took out my 10-inch Takahashi Mewlon 250 telescope and Nikon D 5000 camera. The night promised to be clear and cold and delivered on both. I had viewed the Sun earlier in the day and saw two sunspots coming over the Sun's eastern limb that had been reported to be active. The seeing - steadiness of the atmosphere - was lousy so I didn't take any pics. As darkness and the temp fell, I started out by viewing Venus. Again, the seeing wasn't that good butI took a few pics. Venus is featureless to the eye and was in a gibbous phase. I then looked at Jupiter which had all 4 moons present and took a few pics with somewhat better seeing. I then viewed the great nebula in Orion, M-42, through the camera only and took two pics - one at 30 seconds so I could capture the heart of the nebula, the famous Trapezium cluster of 4 new O-B stars that illuminate the nebula and a longer one of 60 seconds to capture fainter details of this great ste...