Solar System Observing

After a mostly sleepless night the night before last with some health issues that kept me in the bathroom and seriously cut into my sleep, I managed to get some sleep yesterday afternoon for about three or four hours in preparation of a clear night last night.  Clear nights around here are few and far between any time of year but especially in the November through March timeframe so I don't like to waste these rare nights, if possible.  This meant a relatively rare opportunity for viewing some objects in our solar system.  

As the sky darkened to a deep dark blue, I set up a new telescope of mine that I have been evaluating as an option for beginners.  I had three eyepieces on hand;  a low power wide eyepiece, a medium power eyepiece, and a high power eyepiece.  I also had my Sony a6000 camera ready to go with a nosepiece on it so I could slide the camera into the diagonal in place of an eyepiece when I felt the view was worthy of recording. 

Facing the back end of our backyard in our southern sky, we had Jupiter, Saturn, the moon and Venus shining brightly creating a gentle arc from the southeast to the southwest low in the sky and close to the treetops and horizon.  When objects are this low in the sky there is a problem with atmospheric dispersion which causes some wavy viewing with the tops and bottoms of the objects showing a bit of blue and red on opposite sides.  There would be a lot of atmosphere to view through at this low angle but we couldn't pass on this opportunity on such a clear night.  

This little beginner telescope did quite well on these objects.  The views were nice and each object showed easy to see detail.  This little scope was designed with our solar system objects in mind.  

We were only out there for about an hour but it was already in the upper thirties when we came inside to start on dinner.  This damp cold temperature caused our noses to flow like waterfalls and all the astronomy gear was lightly covered in frost when we brought it in the house.  I rarely focus on video but I did on this night.  I shot some photos too but the video turned out far better than the images for some odd reason.

This video is pretty nice so I think I'll have to do more video during our observing sessions in the future!