For those interested, here’s what I was able to see on the first night out with the new telescope.

I’m just in from taking my new telescope out for its first light. Wow is it ever impressive. With the 4.5″ reflector I have, whenever I pushed the image up to 200x it almost always came out blurry and very dim. Quite the opposite with the 8″ – they’re extremly bright and sharp. I’ll be writing up a summary of things I looked at this evening and post a link sometime tomorrow.

My dad stopped by for a while to check out the view, so I gave him a quick tour of Saturn, the Pleiades, Orion Nebula, and the double Castor. After he left my neighbor was out on his deck and we ended up chatting for a while. I offered him the chance to look through the telescope and he seemed very excited but was busy at the moment. He said he’d definitely take me up on the offer another time he sees me out.

Well, time to get to bed. I’m glad I was able to get outside tonight, it’s supposed to be cloudy for the next few days

My new telescope has arrived! Pictures can be seen here. It took a little over 3 hours to get all setup and the mirrors aligned from its apparently bumpy ride across country, but it’s awesome! I’m about to take it out now and get the finder scope aligned and take it for a test drive. Note me holding my old telescope in one of those pictures. Yeah, this one’s big

I ordered my new telescope yesterday, the Orion SkyView Pro 8″ Reflector. I was planning on ordering in a week or two but they had a nice 10% off sale that was too hard to pass up. This will be a vast improvement over my current beginner’s scope which is only 4.5″ in diameter. Needless to say, I’m excited.

Courtesy of Spaceweather.com, here’s a comparison between the size of earth and the size of some current (small) sunspots.

The annual Leonid Meteor Shower is set to begin tonight and extend for several nights. It figures that it’s supposed to be cloudy all week so I’ll miss them just like I missed the eclipse last month. A few years ago Ana and I went a few miles outside of Champaign around 3am to watch and it was a spectacular show. I recommend if you have the chance, check them out.

Tonight I made a very quick test run of using a webcam with my telescope. Lots of people have been very successful in creating awesome photographs with their webcams, but I was pretty skeptical. I’ve been waiting to make a way of connecting the webcam to the telescope until I knew for sure it was actually going to be worth the trouble. After taking a quick shot at the moon, I must say that I’m very impressed and quite excited with what I may be able to do with deep space objects such as nebulas and the like. You can see the very shakey (since I was holding it up to the telescope by hand) video here, it’s a 3MB+ and in Windows Media format – I don’t have any software to go from avi->mpg here.

Right now the game is tied 7-7 in the 7th, after being down 7-2!

I was able to get a few good shots of the moon earlier: waxing gibbous and the bay known as Sinus Iridum.