Spying on Jupiter

Tonight was not a very good night for observing. I had gone out at 8:31 to view a satellite known as Lacrosse 2, but my desperate searching (10 degrees and an azimuth of South) was to no avail.

I then noticed a particularly bright "star" in the SW portion of the Celestial Sphere. I realized that this was the planet Jupiter, which had been explained to us in class that it would be at 30 degrees SSW at 9 PM. After 10 minutes of gazing at it with my binoculars, I had remembered that we had a refracting telescope in the garage.

I got it out, and during the course of an hour of fiddling with it, I realized that it had moved about 3 of my hand widths, or about 18 degrees (which is about the normal speed of a star moving across the sphere).

I finally got the telescope dialed in on Jupiter, and proceeded to spy on it. I didn't see much, just a big, bright, cream-colored circle of light.

With the mosquitos eating me alive, my father (who had been helping me with the telescope) and I decided to call it a night, but I remembered to find the Big Dipper. After a moment of searching, we found it. I tried to find Polaris using the "pointer stars," but it's light was obscured by the clouds and dust in the atmosphere.

Total time: 1 hour.