Telescope Lab - Bradley Balsters, Avery Casey, Seth Dowler

Telescope Lab - Bradley Balsters, Avery Casey, Seth Dowler

Introduction

In this lab, we went to Baker Observatory to observe the night sky through a telescope.

Procedures

In our case, the telescope was already mounted on the mount, so we did not have to set it up. However, we did have to attach the eyepieces and the remote. We then used our finder scope to locate Jupiter and its moons in the sky and made observations.

Results and Discussion

4) The telescope must be focused so you can see objects more clearly. The focus knob moves the lenses toward or away from an object.

5) a. The stars in our field of view took about one minute and 26 seconds to move out of view.

b. The bodies of light are drifting from our view because of the earth’s orbit around the sun.

6) Unfortunately our class didn’t have time to utilize tracking within this lab.

8) a. (photo above)

b. Jupiter is very bright and outshines the surrounding stars — and so appeared, at first, to simply be a very bright star. Another distinguishing characteristic is its moons; we remain unable to determine which moon we were seeing, but it is visible in the above photo, appearing as a small shadow on Jupiter’s visible surface.

c. As stated above, Jupiter has four main (Galilean) moons, one of which was visible to us through our telescope -- it seems very likely that it was either Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, though we were unable to determine which of them it was because we could not see distinctive features on the moon’s surface. Lastly, Jupiter’s rings were not visible from our vantage point.

d. (question not applicable because our object is not the moon)

e. Our object’s brightness is substantial, significantly brighter than the stars that surround it.

f. Because Jupiter appears close enough to observe one of its moons, it seems fair enough to guess that its magnification is around, at least, 75x, possibly 100x.

g. Sadly, we were unable to see the surface of Jupiter extremely clearly because our magnification isn’t great enough and the image, because of this, isn’t sharp enough to reveal the surface’s details.

h. When placing a hand over part of the telescope, we cannot see its outline; rather, what happens is our view is dimmed.

i. The change in brightness is due to the change in the telescope’s aperture: it has less large of an opening through which Jupiter’s light can hit it, and thus less light is received in the sight becomes dimmer.

Description of Jupiter

Jupiter was first observed with a telescope by Galileo. Although Jupiter can be seen with the naked eye, Galileo’s observations led to the discovery of moons orbiting around Jupiter. This was a startling discovery and challenged long-held beliefs about the solar system.  In our picture, you can see one such moon orbiting Jupiter.

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. Its mass is approximately one-thousandth that of the Sun but more than twice the mass of the other planets in the solar system combined. Jupiter is orbited by 67 known moons. Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto are known as the Galilean satellites and are the four closest moons to Jupiter.

Conclusion

We learned about how to set up a telescope, how to locate objects in the sky, focus on the object, and what Jupiter looks like through our own eyes through the telescope.