Although the ways we have looked over so far are efficient, there is one handy tool you should know about, and that’s the finderscope. If you’re going to be outside for a while, take a chair – a reclining chair will allow you to look upwards without straining your neck. Turn off all your outdoor lights and, if you can, get your neighbours to do the same. Before you even look at the sky, take a look at yourself in the mirror. You’re going to be outside for at least an hour, hopefully longer, and it can get cold even on summer nights. Shadows cast by the ring on the planet in front and by the planet on the farther ring can make the image of Saturn pop.
Larger craters that looked tiny at lower magnifications now take up the entire view! You need excellent seeing conditions for these tiny features to look still enough to see, otherwise the Moon will look way too soupy. Eyepieces are critical components for serious planetary observers.
On Earth, these churning cells are about as high as these are tall, but Jupiter’s faster rotation flattens its cells and stretches the cells longitudinally into flattened ovals. Some of these oval cells coalesce into visible and long-lasting vortices, the most famous of which is the Great Red Spot (GRS). This spot straddles the south equatorial belt and the lighter south tropical zone, impinging on each. The GRS, which is larger than Earth, has been observed for centuries and may be a permanent feature in the Jovian atmosphere.
She is the author of several books including “Quantum Physics in Minutes”, “Haynes Owners’ Workshop Manual to the Large Hadron Collider” and “Haynes Owners’ Workshop Manual to the Milky Way”. She holds a degree in physical sciences, a Master’s in astrophysics and a PhD in computational astrophysics. She was elected as a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society in 2011. Previously, she worked for Nature’s journal, Scientific Reports, and created scientific industry reports for the Institute of Physics and the British Antarctic Survey. She has covered stories and features for publications such as Physics World, Astronomy Now and Astrobiology Magazine. So if Discover the best telescope for beginners right here! is, ‘which type of telescope type should I buy?
That time is when Jupiter is at opposition, when it is opposite the Sun in the sky. At opposition, the planet rises in the east as the Sun sets in the west. But Jupiter is large enough to look good for a few months on either side of opposition, so there’s still plenty to see. At its closest approach to Earth, the planet’s disc spans nearly 50” (arcseconds), large enough to see well in a telescope.
However, since the planets are small in angular size – even Jupiter, at largest, is still smaller than 1 arc minute across – this means that more magnification is required to see that detail that the planets offer. Although any telescope can give impressively high magnifications using short focal length eyepieces, there is a point when increasing magnification will provide a worse image rather than improve it. When an object is magnified, its brightness is reduced as the finite amount of light is spread over a larger area. In addition, increasing magnification exacerbates the amount of atmospheric turbulence visible; therefore, high magnifications can only be used when seeing conditions are good. Finally, high magnification is practical only with driven telescopes.