Furthest planet in the solar system from indoors

[iamjulian]

Bit of an odd one for me last night. It was clear at the zenith but quite a bit of cloud hugging the horizon. For one reason and another I couldn't go outside so I decided to have a go at setting the scope up indoors, looking out through the bedroom window. Obviously not a great idea, but better than not seeing anything.

Jupiter looked pretty awful with everything but the least magnification so I stayed with the 32mm (24x) for the rest of the evening. A quick look at Cartes du Ciel reminded me that Neptune was trailing not far behind the big red spotted one. My computer is downstairs but I was observing upstairs, so I drew myself a little map of stars that would allow me to hop across to Neptune. Back upstairs it was easy to find the three distinctive stars that sit just to the east of Neptune at the moment. It was then easy to move slightly across to the little blue dot. Carol put it far more eloquently in her S@N article, "this handy ability of your brain to recognize geometric shapes when you are trying to place the stars within the field of view". Fantastic. Such a weird feeling to know you are looking at such an object. If you take the world population as a whole, I wonder how many, or what percentage have actually seen the furthest major planet?

Back down to the computer to see what else was visible in the limited patch of sky I could see through the window. I wanted to have a go at Uranus but the scope wouldn't sit low enough to allow it to see high enough, if that makes sense. At that point I switched to binoculars to see how close I could get. Above Fomalhaut, there are three very distinctive curved lines of stars. It was easy to follow these up to a triangle of stars within which my little hand drawn map told me was the mag 8.x asteroid Juno. With a sense of excitement at being about to see my 3rd named asteroid I rushed back upstairs. Only to find the 20 gigawatt 'security' light across the road had come on. For reasons best known to themselves they have chosen to have it light up our bedroom rather than their driveway. It takes about ten minutes to go off, and as luck would have it, as soon as it did I found that cloud had rolled in, scuppering any chance of viewing Juno.

[kev]

All im saying is that laser colominators have other uses...

Kev

[Demonperformer]

Have you considered setting up a spare mirror inside your window, so that their security light is shone straight back [or even focussed??] into one of their windows? The kid's bedrooms late at night are a favourite.