Last night, was perfect. It wasn't all that cold outside, it was really dark out, and the skies were crystal clear. The moon was huuugggee and just beneath it, was a small point of light.
I was a little surprised when my dad got home from work and he suggested we go outside and use the telescope that I got for my birthday a few years ago. We don't use it a lot, and I was kind of in the middle of writing a super intense scene. But how could I possibly pass up looking at the moon and stars through a telescope?
So my dad, my brother (Ryan) and I all went outside. The lenses of the telescope were pretty dusty, but the sky was so clear that it hardly mattered. Through the scope, you could see the shadows of the craters on the edge of the moon, and it was amazing. We could have just stared at the moon all night, but I started to become curious about what the tiny point of light was under it.
We shifted the telescope and I got it into view. It definitely wasn't a star. It was much too close to be a star. But it was so bright that at first we thought it was Venus. This is about what it looked like:
I was a little surprised when my dad got home from work and he suggested we go outside and use the telescope that I got for my birthday a few years ago. We don't use it a lot, and I was kind of in the middle of writing a super intense scene. But how could I possibly pass up looking at the moon and stars through a telescope?
So my dad, my brother (Ryan) and I all went outside. The lenses of the telescope were pretty dusty, but the sky was so clear that it hardly mattered. Through the scope, you could see the shadows of the craters on the edge of the moon, and it was amazing. We could have just stared at the moon all night, but I started to become curious about what the tiny point of light was under it.
We shifted the telescope and I got it into view. It definitely wasn't a star. It was much too close to be a star. But it was so bright that at first we thought it was Venus. This is about what it looked like:
After a few seconds of looking at it though, I knew it couldn't be Venus. Venus doesn't have any moons. The tiny points of light around the planet are. I ended up narrowing it down to either Jupiter or Saturn because they both have a ridiculous amount of moons. And then Saturn has rings (at least, rings that we can see), so I decided that it had to be Jupiter.
When it turned out that it actually was Jupiter, I was pretty impressed with my astronomical object identification skills! As far as planets go anyway...
Then we got busy with the iPad, pointing it up at the sky and identifying the stars. (Seriously, there's this really awesome app. that allows you to point the camera at the sky and it will tell you what the object is! How cool is that?!!) We got to see Vega, the Ring Nebula, Altair (seeing that star was awesome because not only is it a very bright star in the night sky, it's also the name of one of my characters :) ), and even our lovely neighboring galaxy, M31 aka the Andromeda!
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| (Jupiter) |
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| (Ring Nebula) |
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| (Altair :D ) |
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| (Andromeda Galaxy... how inspiring is that!?) |
All in all, it was a wonderful, inspirational night!
--Jess
