Looking at the moon

May 13, 2007

Aparna and I had been thinking about buying a telescope for a long time. We had been reading several articles off the Internet about buying telescopes and seeing pictures taken by amateurs to figure out what we could see if we did buy a telescope within our price range. Finally we did it!!! Three days ago, we bought a 130mm (5.1 inch) reflector telescope (god bless newton), focal length 650mm . It came with two eye pieces 25mm (26x) and 9mm (72x). It has 375x light collection capacity compared to the naked eye. We saw the moon closer than we have ever seen it before.

The first time I saw through a telescope was more than 20 years ago when my friend Sauri Sen showed me Saturn. I was very young then and did not understand much about the workings of a telescope. I had imagined I would see a big ball with rings around it and all I could see was a small speck. It was too small for me to discern any rings. I was quite disappointed. I had to take his elder brother's word for it that it was Saturn and there was no way it came even close to what I had imagined I would see.

The next time I saw through a telescope was at the Griffith Observatory, LA, during Mars' closest approach through a 4 inch. A bunch of us from Vista Magnolia went there. There were thousands of people who had lined up to see Mars. The line for the 8 inch telescope was too long and we figured that they would close the viewing before we made it. We stood in the 4 inch telescope line instead. After about 2 hours of waiting we got our 2 minutes with the telescope. Mars looked bigger than a speck but still was really a tiny little red ball bearing. I could faintly discern the Martian polar ice-caps. I loved it and wished I had come earlier to see it through the 8 inch one.

The next time was when Rishi, Aparna, Ramya and I saw the moon through Rishi's 2.5 inch telescope at the Zuma beach in Los Angeles on a day of a total lunar eclipse. It was wonderful. Unfortunately we forgot to get the tripod stand and we had to improvise. We used garbage bins, rocks and so on and eventually made a stable platform. It was an exhilarating experience to see the shadow move across the lunar surface. So that was the third time I had seen through an optical telescope.

Yesterday we inaugurated our scope. We unpacked it and figured out some basics about setting it up. I was agog to see the moon up close. The moon however, would rise at about 3.30 A.M. from 85 degrees East and this meant that by 4:30 it would be visible from our balcony. After setting up the telescope we slept and set our alarm for early in the morning. We woke up at 4:00 A.M and practiced aligning the telescope to the stars using the optical viewfinder. We tried seeing a few stars. Among the two of us, Aparna is better at finding things and the same holds true with her ability to find stars. I struggled with viewfinder and soon realised that there was a problem since the laser finder was off by a little. Meanwhile, Aparna was awesome at finding stars. She told me how to orient the telescope and I simply listened. There was too much ambient light but I was amazed at the number of stars I could see by simply pointing the scope at some random location. The best direction was vertically upwards.

The moon rose as per schedule. We could hardly wait to see it. We put in the 25mm and Aparna started to find the moon and focused the eye-piece. Oh, I will not forget her exclamation upon seeing the moon up close. "Wow!!! its the moon!!" she screamed, "its beautiful!"Indeed it was! I had never seen the moon so close and clear. Its numerous craters were clearly visible. I craved for more. Immediately I switched to the 9mm and focused it. The view was unbelievable. The craters were amazingly clear. We had a lunar map with us to identify the various craters we were looking at.

I tried taking a photo by putting my camera on to the eye-piece, but this proved exceptionally hard since the camera's active focusing would take over and get fooled. Anyway there are no words that can explain the feeling when you see the moon so close - you have to see it yourself.

The efforts of Newton, Galileo and many others that followed have, even today, been only able to motivate a very small percentage of mankind into looking up into the wonderful night sky. I only wish sometimes that more people were motivated to learn and explore the universe. Today, even if I randomly sample among the well-educated, only about one in ten would have ever seen through a telescope and even less would do so on a regular basis. People flock to movies but there are no facilities where people crowd to see craters of the moon and planets or binary star systems. I am sometimes astonished at this widespread apathy towards space even in this age where space shuttles shuttle back and forth. We work all day during working days, spend weekends in settling household chores and settling bills and forget to experience wonder.

Now that we have a telescope, we hope to learn a lot more about the universe around us over the next few years. Our 4mm (162.5x) and 2.3mm (282x) eye-pieces are on the way! Moon will be closer to us than it has ever been. I can't wait to have a look at the moon through them.