Structured Procrastination » titan http://blog.adamspiers.org because there's always something more interesting than what you should be doing Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:16:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 first astronomy ventures http://blog.adamspiers.org/2009/06/17/first-astronomy-ventures/ http://blog.adamspiers.org/2009/06/17/first-astronomy-ventures/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:35:39 +0000 Adam http://blog.adamspiers.org/?p=112 Becky’s dad recently lent us his old telescope. This typically crappy British summer meant that we had to wait a few days for a clear night sky, but we amused ourselves passing the time by counting the number of people in each capsule on the London Eye and reading the time off Big Ben. One the first night a gap in the clouds appeared, I randomly picked the first bright star I could see, pointed the telescope at it, whacked on the most powerful lens, and saw something like this (if you are reading this on facebook or can’t see the following image, view the original post):

a first look through the telescope

“That’s weird, it’s got a strange line through it”, I said to Becky, and then 3 seconds later swore loudly as I realised what it actually was:

Saturn and Titan as shown by Stellarium

These nice images come from an amazing piece of software called Stellarium which is free and works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

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