The Astronomy Course materials for the Open University's S194 course have arrived. Flipping through the book it looks like one of those courses where you have to remember lots of facts, and also have to do practical things too.

The course starts on the 12th, so I'll be spending time getting the resources lined up and in readable forms. If I can get ( Read more... )

Tuesday night the sky was clear, and by 10.30-ish Jupiter was visible well above the house opposite. I took the telescope out into the front garden, and attached the recently-purchased 5mm eyepiece and lunar filter.
The eyepiece gave a more magnified, but still reasonably sharp view of Jupiter, and the eyepiece cut out most of the glare so that ( Read more... )

Last night a very bright star was risng over a neighbour's house out the front, so I wandered outside with the telescope (much swearing) and set it up outside.

The telescope came with three different eyepieces. There was one marked '20mm', one marked '10mm' and one called 'Barlow' which doubles the magnification of one of the other two.

The numbers ( Read more... )