Observations 9/7/2024

Richard P. Hill 

Present: Dr. Kerry Kuehn, Ryan Spelde, Tyler Guldberg (Some of the other Kuehns came out to see the scope as well)

9/7/2024

This lab is one of the following reports written long after the fact. As of writing this report, it is 9/19/2024. This was the first night that our new Celestron C11 Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) was taken out for some stargazing. My memory is a bit cloudy, but I will recount it the best I can.

The first object we turned the scope to was the star Deneb. This is the second telescope that Wisconsin Lutheran College (WLC) owns with tracking capabilities. There is one significant difference between the scopes, though. The old scope is a wedge mount, while the new telescope is a German Equatorial Mount, specifically the Celestron Advanced VX Mount. The scope's Right Ascension tracking capabilities are excellent when correctly set up. This photo is a testament to that. This is a thirty-second exposure on a point of the celestial sphere that would rotate reasonably fast. If the scope were not tracking, this picture would look like a blur, but instead, the stars were still like pins. This is extremely important as I have started to do longer exposures on deep-sky objects or high-magnification pictures.

Not to be captain obvious, but Saturn appears quite small here, doesn't it? I don't plan on cropping these images unless I absolutely have to. At this point, I was already looking into lens projection to get closer-up shots of Saturn, but little did I know how much effort that would take. I only took a few pictures of Saturn that night as quite a few people wanted to look at Saturn through a lens. Even though the photo doesn't reflect it, this was the point that the telescope went from being cool to impressive. The difference between this scope and the old one was finally starting to show beyond just the really cool mechanized mount. Saturn was almost crystal clear through the eyepiece. Saturn will make quite a few appearances in these observations.