For meteor showers visible over Merseyside during 2023 see Meteor Shower Calendar and click their names for more details, and for any observable comets check here. To learn about the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights), then visit AuroraWatch UK where you can choose to sign up to receive e-mail alerts. Align the finder-scope, orientate with the telescope, find an ideal location and allow the telescope to acclimatize. Doing these simple steps will certainly make observing more successful and enjoyable.
Galileo’s demonstration of his tool in Venice earned him a lifetime of acclaim and respect. He discovered that the moon is pockmarked with craters and mountains rather than “flat” deformations and that Jupiter has at least four moons. “We can do this analysis right now for the big, hot planets, with lots of gas that the light shines through,” says Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer at Cornell University whose research focuses on new planets around other stars.
And it provides sufficient power to introduce you to objects in the deep sky. The NexStar 5SE operates on a fully computerized system and gives you a handheld controller to guide it. Instead of fumbling to read star charts and align the telescope manually, with the press of a button you can align and focus your telescope on a myriad of celestial objects. Unlike with some of the NexStar 5SE’s competitors, this controller worked flawlessly in our tests, offering micro adjustments and responsive tracking with the attached controller system.
If interest persists, you can always add a telescope to the family down the road and still have a spotting scope for daily use with birds and other wildlife. While you can certainly use a telescope for terrestrial viewing, they aren’t specifically designed for that task. Conversely, the spotting scope wasn’t designed to look at the moon and planets, but it does a pretty good job of that when needed. Your family member’s interest in the stars may fade, but almost everyone loves watching birds, mammals, and other creatures up close. But, while deciding to purchase a telescope for viewing planets is one thing, actually buying a functional one is another one.
The latest version of the C8 is the Celestron Advanced VX 8-inch. This is particularly true for Mars, which boasts a multitude of features given its mountainous and carved terrain. Filters come in different colors and screw — or thread — simply into your eyepiece. For example, orange or red filters will enhance the appearance of dark features on Mars’ surface such as the V-shaped Syrtis Major. A blue filter, meanwhile, can highlight clouds on Mars, and in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. An ultraviolet filter, such as the Alpine Astronomical Baader U-Venus filter, can show subtle details in the atmosphere of Venus.
Callisto may appear closer to Jupiter’s disc than Io as it prepares to pass behind the planet, for example. Looking for the best telescope under 200 – Look no further! Take a look at the best telescopes under £200 right here! and Telescope magazine provides a useful and free tool to help you find the positions of all four moons at any time. Jet streams of opposite direction on each edge of the belts and zones confine each structure, and as the gases whirl across the face of the planet at speeds exceeding 300 km/h, turbulence occurs at the boundaries. This turbulence leads to intricate and exceedingly beautiful structures called garlands and festoons between and within each belt and zone (again, see image at the top of this page). On nights of steady seeing, you can get glimpses of these structures in a small telescope. You will then need to process with an art package such as Adobe Photoshop.
We found that the Celestron AstroFi 102 Telescope is an amazing Saturn telescope and gave us fabulous images of the Rings. The 4” aperture allowed us to see individual rings, separate from the planet! We left out Mercury and Venus because they are quite challenging to observe! Observing Mercury requires a solar filter for your telescope and a lot of patience. Venus is the most difficult to find of the two, as it’s best viewed during the day and hides behind a thick cloud. It has an EQ-2 equatorial mount with manual slow-motion controls that allow smooth and precise movement.
A focal ratio is a number calculated by dividing the diameter of the telescope by the focal length, This number will be related to the image quality that a certain telescope may have. And the James Webb Telescope continues its journey across the Universe, studying new stars, clusters, and nebulae. It will be able to look into the past of the Universe, find out how stars and planets are born, which will allow us to better understand the origin of our planet Earth.