Moon Dance

Last night I went out to the observatory and really had no plan other than to use my TEC 140 to observe Saturn and the Moon.  I decided to check out Saturn first and inserted an 8mm eyepiece.  The seeing conditions (atmospheric stability) were incredible, and I decided to go for broke immediately.  I inserted my Pentax XW 3.5mm eyepiece for a magnification of 280x and was rewarded with no image breakdown.  I was so impressed with being able to easily discern the delicate inner C ring around Saturn that I ran inside to bring Ian out to take a look.  He was pretty impressed as well and thought that we should try and take some pictures of Saturn and the Moon.  Of course, I am not an imager, so we grabbed our little Canon point and shoot camera (The Elph!) and held it up to the eyepiece.  It was hard to hold the camera steady for Saturn as you can see at right, but even with the blurry image, you can see the C ring just inside the main rings.  It helps to click on the image to see it full size.

The main show was the moon- Ian's favorite target.  We had a bit more success taking hand-held shots of the moon through the telescope...actually, pretty impressive if I must say so myself!  Click the images to enlarge them.

Finally, this morning I was outside cutting up some tree branches and noticed two rather large lizards playing a game of tag...the game went on for well over an hour as I worked, and clearly the lizards were so engrossed in the game, that they really did not care about me or the noisy chainsaw I was using.  Finally the chase ended in the oldest of all moon dances...