A bright moon at the observatory limited deep sky observing so we shot some more footage of Uranus, this time with the recently refurbished 20″ reflector. As this telescope is f/5 a x2 barlow produced a slightly larger image for the same f/10 as the Celestron.
The clouds finally cleared on Saturday evening for long enough to finally get some pictures of the outer planes, Uranus and Neptune. These pictures are really only for completeness. While these planets are gas giants, they’re so far away that they appear tiny through the telescope. The distances in the outer Solar system are truely staggering, Uranus is 19AU away (an AU is the distance form the Earth to the Sun, 93 million miles) or 1.6 billion miles; Neptune, 29AU or 2.7 billion miles. Put another way, the light that the telescope is collecting from Neptune has travelled for 8 hours since leaving the Sun.
Uranus Neptune
Both images were taken using the modified webcam on the Club’s Celestron 9.25 at f/10.
