Hi everyone, this is my first post here but I have been reading a lot of post before deciding to create an account and post my question. I just bought a Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ, and used it yesterday for the first time. However I am not sure if my experience was right or if I was doing something wrong. Here is a few notes of what I did/had:
1. I went to the mountains and was about 1800m above sea level, the sky seemed clear and I was able to see a lot of starts with my naked eye.
2. I only had the 20mm and 10mm eye pieces that comes with the telescope.
3. I aligned my laser finder beforehand and was pretty happy with the results as I was able to point and see any object I want.
4. I left the telescope out for around an hour to bring it to the outside temperature.
5. First I looked and the moon and brought it into focus and the image was very clear and sharp. I was able to easily see the craters with both eye pieces and with a lot of details.
Here is my issue, after watching the moon I decide to try something more challenging, so I pointed the telescope at Jupiter since it was also very close to the moon. I looked up a lot of images online and had my expectation tuned given the telescope and eye pieces, I knew it was going to be small. But my problem is that it just looked like a star, a shining white dot. I am sure it was Jupiter since I was able to see 3 of its satellites and they were at the same position that the Star Walk app showed me. Was I doing something wrong ? Can't I get better results with these equipment and at least see some kind of colors/details on Jupiter atmosphere ? I saw a similar post in here and the main advice was to collimate the score but I don't think this is the issue because I feel like the moon looked sharp enough. I was also able to find Saturn, the rings where barely visible, the separation between the planet and the ring is blurred.
If this is the best I can get with the current setup, then what do you suggest I change or add to get a better viewing experience.
Thank you in advance, and I hope to give back to this community when I get better 😛