When I was a teenager me and a friend use to spend countless hours learning the constellations and gazing through our telescopes. All we had were a 4 1/2" reflector (mine) and a slightly smaller aperture refractor (his), but we made the best of them and found that having a clear night and an optimal viewing vantage point made a huge difference. It was about that time that his family moved to a place up in the mountains, boy did that improve clarity of what we were able to see compared to what we were use to seeing down in the city.
Some of my personal favourite details of what were able to resolve with out meagre telescopes were the polar ice caps of Mars, the great red spot and the atmospheric bands on Jupiter and the phases of Venus. Venus has no discernible detail on it's surface, but watching the phases is kind of cool, and because of it’s nearness to Earth it has the distinction of being the planet that looks the largest in the view of telescope. I remember one evening when the moon was in it's crescent phase and right next to Venus I pulled out the telescope and zeroed in on Venus and got a little confused because when I looked through the eye piece what I saw look just like the crescent moon I could see with my naked eye minus the surface details, but it was so close to the same size and crescent phase of the moon that I though that somehow I had mistakenly captured the moon in my telescope view.
Speaking of relative size, anybody know what the largest relative viewable object in the sky is?
I’ll give you a hint, it’s total relative size is six times as wide as the full Moon in the sky, it’s actual size is somewhat larger.
Some of my personal favourite details of what were able to resolve with out meagre telescopes were the polar ice caps of Mars, the great red spot and the atmospheric bands on Jupiter and the phases of Venus. Venus has no discernible detail on it's surface, but watching the phases is kind of cool, and because of it’s nearness to Earth it has the distinction of being the planet that looks the largest in the view of telescope. I remember one evening when the moon was in it's crescent phase and right next to Venus I pulled out the telescope and zeroed in on Venus and got a little confused because when I looked through the eye piece what I saw look just like the crescent moon I could see with my naked eye minus the surface details, but it was so close to the same size and crescent phase of the moon that I though that somehow I had mistakenly captured the moon in my telescope view.
Speaking of relative size, anybody know what the largest relative viewable object in the sky is?
I’ll give you a hint, it’s total relative size is six times as wide as the full Moon in the sky, it’s actual size is somewhat larger.
