Telescope Reviews: Quick observing session for tonight

In short:

The milky way is actually still impressive when you turn binoculars on it, even from mag 3 skies.

I managed to find Lyra floating just over my house and split the first-order component of epsilon lyrae a little too easily in my 15x70s. Can't spot the ring nebula, but I'm pretty sure I found the area that contains it; I'll turn the scope on it with the O-III filter, first chance I get.

Finally saw Jupiter this year with something other than just my eyes. It is really something else in a nice set of binoculars. At 15x, you can make out some banding on the planet, and see the moons pretty clearly, and the binoculars have a field of view and depth of field such that you can actually _see_ Jupiter floating up above the rough branches of the tree in the next yard over. It's quite a beautiful view.

As far as detail, I've found that the Jupiter model in xephem can be made to represent my binocular view of Jupiter pretty well. It looked like the attached picture.

Chris

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"To tread the sharp edge of a sword;
to run on smooth-frozen ice,
one needs no footsteps to follow..."

"Well, people sometimes ask me 'how did you get involved in astronomy?' I said 'I got born, what's your problem?'" -- John Dobson

"In discussing the large-scale structure of the cosmos, astronomers sometimes say that space is curved, or that the universe is finite but unbounded. Whatever are they talking about?" -- Carl Sagan

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