Jupiter and Saturn last evening

Last evening I was checking out a new club scope, a Nextar 8. The GOTO function was almost flawless, but the image quality seemed somewhat lacking. I tweaked the collimation somewhat and the images improved dramatically! I was astounded at the quality of the images at up to 300x. The red spot on Jupiter was obvious even at the edge of the limb as it was beginning to appear. The numerous white spots on one band were easy to observe, and I swear I could detect the presence of markings on Ganymede. Saturn was equally impressive in all respects.
The drawings simply don't do justice to the quality of the images, but I felt I had to try. I sure wish I had Sol's and Carlos's artistic abilities!!
Walt

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Walter,

Thank you for the compliment on my drawing abilities. Your observations of Jupiter and Saturn show much detail. The poor reputation of most Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes (e.g. Nexstar 8) out there is due to poor collimation. The SCT observer would do well to collimate their instrument at each observing session. The SCT is very easy to misalign.

Please keep up the excellent work.

Carlos

Hi Walter,

and thanks. for lighting, I started to use a light that you can get at music stores. It is used to light sheet music. Runs on AA batteries, has a large clip and the light source swivels.

Its very bright so I made a "sock" that slips over the light source. I made one out of a piece of an old gray T shirt, double layered to cut brightness.

When the weather allows for DSO observing from dark sky sites, I plan on using a sock made from red T shirt material.

Kepp the drawings coming, Sol Robbins

I don't doubt you re ganymede I've previously seen an L shaped feature just in the south eastern corner of its disc.

I was using a 14.3 inch cassegrain and it was 1996 also detected it just in my old celestron 8 which was a good planetary scope.

I needed high power 333 and 430 to see it well in the celestron.