Saturn captured with a 60mm refractor

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Photographer:

[email protected]

Location of Photo:

Warrington, Pennsylvania

Date/Time of photo:

6/29/2015 ~9:30 EST

Equipment:

60mm - 2.4" refractor

Description:

Yes, I realize that this photo, in one sense, is a pauper's offering of the ringed planet when compared to the astrophotography of gear exceeding my personal budget as well as the pocket books of many amateur astronomers. But beyond the budgetary constraints, lies the wonder behind the physics that would even "allow" 60mm of ground glass to capture an object some 830 million miles from earth where the reflected light from the sun takes over a hour to reach our tiny blue planet—remarkable! It truly is a wonder. The first time I looked through my shop teacher's Questar back in 1962 when I was in an astronomy club in eighth grade, I was hooked (I still have my eye out for a good pre-owned Questar 3.5). This photo was taken on 5/15/2015 with a 2.4" altazimuth refractor. I used an Orion® StarShootTM Video eyepiece II with a Orion® StarShootTM LCD-DVR configuration. I downloaded the .avi file and played the video and paused at points that appeared to give decent resolutions of the tiny wanderer. In the future I hope to create a website that would be called something like "little-scopes" to encourage those with few resources not to give up at seeing the wonders of the universe.