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I have the 8-inch Sky-Watcher, the baby of the family. I highly recommend it. It is no good for photography, but it’s fairly portable and sets up in 5 minutes. The spotting scope is crap; get a Telrad (red spot pointer).
It’s so tantalizingly close too. Just about a lightsecond away.
I’ve overshot gas giants by more than that playing Elite Dangerous. And I’ve flown to it in Kerbal Space Program.
It’s so frustrating that we’ve given up on any manned spaceflight besides LEO for the last several decades.
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I had a similar reaction the first time I saw the moon with my far less impressive telescope. And then when I saw Jupiter and could see clearly that it had its own moons, it just made it all so much more real and amazing than all the photos in books and reading could ever do.
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A couple days later, in the LA Times:
Pink eye epidemic strikes downtown LA…
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Dobsonians are great starter telescopes, except for being a little bulky and awkward to move around, they are incredibly easy to use.
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Oh it’s many years since I last visited rathergood. Thank you for bringing this back into my life (and destroying what’s left of my productivity for this week)! Now, where are the kittens???
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Thank you for that.
It made my day.
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I’ve been an amateur astronomer since my early teens, and I teach astronomy now, so I’ve had this experience many times. It’s even better when you show people Saturn.
Once when I was still working on my Ph.D., I was adjuncting at a nearby small college, teaching an evening astronomy class. Since it was a night course, I could bring my scope and we could have an observing session at the end of the class period. And since it was a night class, most of the students were older adults who were returning to get a second degree for job reasons – most of them a business degree or an MBA.
I’ll never forget showing the students in this class Saturn. I had never before shown someone Saturn and not had them audibly gasp. These people just looked through the telescope, made a grunt of acknowledgement, and moved on… one after one… the whole line of them.
It was that moment when I learned that corporate/MBA types literally have no souls.
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Yikes, you almost want to check for a pulse.
With Saturn, you know what it’s supposed to look like but seeing it out there, actually in that moment looking like that, is (using technical language here) bananas.
Another crazy one for me was seeing the shadow of one of Jupiter’s moons on the face of Jupiter. I couldn’t actually make out the moon itself (too close in color to Jupiter for my vision/scope), but I knew it was there transiting Jupiter because I could see that little circular shadow. That’s great stuff.
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That’s no moon… that’s a Flippin MOON…!!!
Dobsonians were designed for exactly this purpose.
http://www.sfsidewalkastronomers.org/index.php?page=the-sidewalk
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They got in their Viking ship and sailed away.
Yep, the scope in the video had a Telrad.
The San Jose Astronomical Association does public events all over the place in the south bay, especially so at the school star parties. This is exactly the kind of reaction people have, all the time. Watching people have that reaction is addicting, it really is.
If any of you ever find yourselves in San Jose or nearby, and want to experience that kind of reaction, be sure to let the SJAA folks know, and be sure to mention you heard about it on BB!
What usually happens is the other way around, kids with face paint look in your eyepiece and leave a gooey eyepiece. Never bring your Naglers to a public event!
I get this reaction on full moon viewing with even a much lower power ( I assume) spotting scope - something about quality glass optics make it magical, it really gathers the light and fills up the eyepiece. Also, did all these people forget what the surface of the moon looks like? They seem very amazed for adults - I guess that makes the video interesting.
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