I just saw this this morning and had to share it. I’ve been wanting to comment on this since O’Reilly made his “tides” comment, but haven’t gotten around to it. Colbert does it just fine!
moon
Cassini is teh awsum!
The Cassini spacecraft took this (these?) picture of Saturn on August 12th. It’s actually 75 separate pictures stitched together. Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy has more info.
If you check out an uber-sized version, you can see four of Saturn’s moons, too. The image below links to the 1-meg JPG version. There are higher resolution images at the link above. They’re all awesome.
The sky finally clears!
Last night was the first time I got to use my new telescope that I got from Telescopes.com. It was delivered on July 17th and, with one exception, the sky has been cloudy every… single… night! Finally, last night, there were enough clear spots that I could get a nice view of the moon and the detail. The view, even without a filter, was terrific. Megan was pretty excited about it, too (Lori took a look and said she saw footprints. Ha!).
The moon was probably only about one-third full, but there were lots of craters visible with great resolution. I used a 20mm eyepiece to position everything (about 50x magnification) and then switched to a 10mm eyepiece (100x) to get more detail. I almost expected to see the LRO cruising around the moon!
I’ll be taking a drive with the telescope to a much darker location with less light pollution soon, so I’m hoping to get an even better moon view and some great views of a planet or two… if I can find them. I’m still not fluent with the whole astronomical coordinate language yet, so that’s going to be tough for awhile.
I’m really looking forward to a clearer night with a fuller moon.