First time Uranus

[gooseholla]

After a couple of nights of waiting for a good night, pointed my scope into Pisces and started the hunt for Uranus. After a bit of guess work to the location, my Wixey helped locate it with the right altitude. Was a bluish disk in space, with a slight tinge of green. It kept fading to grey and was not very bright because of the clouds. Could only follow it for a couple of minutes until cloud washed it out.

A 15mm (106X) didn't show any detail other than the colour (didn't add anything over 80x). Wish my 1.25" focused so I could boost the power. Am I likley to see any details with a 12inch scope?

[Moonshane]

possibly, depends on seeing really as you'd need a fair bit of magnification. Paul Abel sees stripes of fainter sections with an 8" I think. I have never seen anything other than a greenish disk.

[Damo636]

Same here, only ever seen it as a featurless pale green disc.

[Phil Fargaze]

I had a peek at it last night and much the same as yourself. I don`t know how anyone can see any features on the tiny disc

but I guess perseverance and very good seeing could produce some results. Still, it always feels good to be able to actually find such a distant world.

To top it all off I found Neptune as well. I could`nt see any detail on that either!

[Josh Wilson]

With a 12 inch you can definitely see a large amount of detail. If your dob is on a tracking mount, you could forget about moving the scope and just view without moving, in which case you might be able to pick out details more easy. Uranus itself is pretty dull in color and doesn't offer as much "diversity" as Jupiter's cloud bands but you might see much better detail under better seeing.

[Josh Wilson]

I forgot to put in that you can probably see its four of its five main moons. Miranda might not be visible given that the limiting magnitude of your scope is about 15 while Miranda's magnitude is about 15.8. It might be feasible, but you'd need much better conditions as stated above. Clear skies and dark adapted eyes!

[Moonshane]

I don't disagree Josh but ignoring the constant cloud the vast majority of people in the UK are surrounded by rooftops, ambient orange glow and neighbours who insist on using their lighting after dark (how dare they!).

Thankfully there are still some relatively dark refuges in the UK.

[EntropyStar]

I found it relatively easily for the first time this weekend, star hopped down from Algenib (Pegasus) and Omega Piscium. From my terribly light polluted garden it was very easy once located to pick it out from the surrounding stars. Under low magnification is looks like any other star, once magnification is applied it quickly becomes a flat disc. I could make out one moon slightly but the disc itself revealed no texture, I used 342x as my max magnification and viewed through a 10” dob. I can’t recommend highly enough a low power wide field EP to make star hopping a breeze.

[cotterless45]

Well done to all you finders!

I get the blue disc and the greenish disc. I did get a field view indicating Pluto, not sure which speck it was though.

Nick.

[Paul G. Abel]

After a couple of nights of waiting for a good night, pointed my scope into Pisces and started the hunt for Uranus. After a bit of guess work to the location, my Wixey helped locate it with the right altitude. Was a bluish disk in space, with a slight tinge of green. It kept fading to grey and was not very bright because of the clouds. Could only follow it for a couple of minutes until cloud washed it out.

A 15mm (106X) didn't show any detail other than the colour (didn't add anything over 80x). Wish my 1.25" focused so I could boost the power. Am I likley to see any details with a 12inch scope?

Greetings. I have seen some subtle details on the disk of Uranus, but you need to have a resonable transparent sky (the planet is quite faint) and you need to use high magnificatio, so good seeing. I find powers of 350x-400x will show some details but they are subtle and not always present. Sometimes, like you I have observed Uranus in good consitions and the disk has been blank. I am pleased we have more people observing the planet as I'm sure storms must come and go on the disk. For high power work I use the University of Leicester's 20" DK and x600 which helps. One thing which may help; try looking at Ganymede for a while first, then when you move the Uranus, the disk will seem much bigger. You will also need to be dark adapted, and be prepared to observe for about 15 minutes before anything really becomes visible.

Best wishes,

-Paul.