Gregoria Luna's Astronomy Blog

I really like the Galileoscope. It's the only scope I have which can be used with no table, chair, or any surface other than the ground. It has two accessories which are sturdy enough I feel comfortable putting them in my pocket. And it's surprisingly capable for planets.

I sort of procrastinated writing this and it is now kind of leaving my mind, so here's a very rough and quick summary of my sidewalk astronomy adventure on September 26th, 2020, or International Observe The Moon Night. I had been aware of NASA's Observe The Moon Night for about a month, but I was gonna let it slip by with perhaps just a passing glance through my Galileoscope. It was just too dangerous to do a sidewalk astronomy session during the pandemic. But that all changed two days before the night. I saw this reddit post about a Radical Astronomy Vehicle for Educating Neighbors, a sidewalk astronomy setup on a push-trolley which included a 10" Dobsonian, a homemade radio telescope, a laptop, a phone camera on the dob, and a large monitor to display the phone picture. After messing around trying to find a solution for showing my phone's view on the television screen, I realized I had everything I needed to make a video astronomy setup myself. One which would be co...

Time to tell you of the story of my first telescope. I was never super into visual astronomy as a kid. Dunno why. Maybe it was a combination of suburban light pollution, poor vision which often went uncorrected, and a really disappointing experience with a lunar eclipse in first or second grade (they show the eclipsed moon as being so red on tv! I was expecting a colorful show! My second total eclipse, the January 2019 one, was a lot more fun since I knew what to expect). I appreciated the Moon in the sky, and I could identify one (1) constellation, or rather, an asterism within it: Orion's Belt (for some reason not his body, though).

Back in early July, I found a hell of a deal on a telescope tube on craigslist. The Omni XLT 150 optical tube, for $60 bucks. It sells new for $290. (OTA only) I picked it up and brought it home, with the plan being that I would embark in my first journey into Amateur Telescope Making and build a Dobsonian Mount for it, based upon this blog post from 10 Minute Astronomy.

An aperture mask is a simple cap you place over the telescope to cut down the aperture. The reasons why you might want to do this are not obvious, but in short, they cut down on optical aberrations significantly. This is especially important in a telescope with flawed optics--specifically those with spherical mirrors. This article will be about masking down a FirstScope, but the same principle could apply to any telescope with a spherical mirror, including telescopes that for the price have no right to have one, such as the deplorable PowerSeeker 127EQ and the AstroMaster 114EQ. The Celestron FirstScope is one of my favorite small telescopes, and it's pretty good for scanning around for bright DSOs, glancing at the Moon, etc. Its stock eyepieces are utter garbage, and when combined with the fast spherical mirror (76mm f/4), the Huygens 20mm is almost unusable.

I had no idea, going in to creating a blog, that my very first observing report for this blog would be so eventful. Not only did I have an amazing night, but it had a rocky start. I got great observing done tonight in the end.

This is a short report of an experiment I attempted on 2020 July 14, wherein I tilt a tabletop dob so it becomes equatorial mounted.