FUN WITH MICROSCOPES

FUN WITH MICROSCOPES

A little about my first GOOD (utterly fantastic!) microscope. I got it off Amazon: it’s an OMAX 40X-2000X Lab LED Binocular Compound Microscope with Double Layer Mechanical Stage and Coaxial Coarse/Fine Focusing Knob. They have many similar models, but if you search on the previous, bold font sentence it should bring up what is a great microscope for the casual user who is sick of garage-sale microscopes.

It's resting atop a $5 DAV (Disabled American Vets Resale Shop) power unit. The power unit is just like a powerstrip that you throw on the floor, only it's in a neat box and each of the 5 plugs have their own on/off switch. I flip the main switch and all my gear comes on. The "printer" switch I leave off until I want to make a black and white Dell laser copy of something--it sure beats crawling behind the desk and reaching to the back of the printer and trying to feel where the power switch is! Aux2 powers the microscope, which has a very bright and cool to the touch LED lamp. Cool to the touch is important because some microscopes have hot halogen lights that can fry and kill any bacteria, etc. that you're viewing. Also LED lasts for ever, halogen bulbs require frequent replacement-which is annoying.

My first degree had a concentration in photography and I have built and used optical systems before. One of the first book covers I updated in my art department job at a major publishing company was the one above. I had to find a clip-art microscope and change it to match the blue color used in the series. Everywhere I go: optics, optics, optics!

Anyway, I wanted something to play with when it was too cloudy for playing telescopes, or practicing on my carbon fiber cello (home-made modification of an old Kay cello) . You can skip down to neat photos if you're not shopping for a microscope. 

First: the highest magnification objective lens is oil immersion only. You must put a drop of oil on your slide cover and then lower the lens into the oil to focus on anything. You must NOT do that with the other three lenses. This is what allows the 2000x magnification: light goes through oil instead of unsteady air. It's a fantastic feature at this price. Don't worry though, you can be happy just using the other 3 lenses, which is what I plan on using mostly.

**If you're thinking about buying a microscope and you didn't know what oil immersion objective meant-now is the time to research 'microscopy techniques' along with 'microscope slide preparation' and 'cell staining' techniques and 'dark field' vs 'light field'-- illumination'. I chose the LED light because: they run cold so it won't kill live pond cells like a hot halogen would. They also last longer.


So, how is this scope? Well it's better than what I used in high school and Chem I in university. It's way better than my 4 cheapie Tasco-style garage sale scopes and my homemade macro-bellow system.

This is part of my Frankenstein-scope system. Basically .99cent junk I bought at various garage sales that still did pretty well for taking afocal microphotographs. For a discussion on how easy and cool afocal photography is check my previous blog posts.

The above photos of a fruit fly were taken with the GARAGE-SALE microscope. Not too shabby, but the Omax does a LOT better as you'll soon see. I caught the fruit fly by setting a flat saucer filled with apple cider vinegar next to a pineapple. 

I took this image with my cellphone held up to the eyepiece of a .99 cent microscope aimed at a laundry dryer sheet at around 50x magnification. Not bad for less than a buck!

...NOW BACK TO THE GREAT NEW MICROSCOPE

Assembly was easy: loosen knob at top to remove top cover. Remove clear cap on underside of head unit. Place head unit on top of scope and re-tighten knob. Pop in the eyepieces: my 20x were **really** tight and hard to install, but it's 40 degrees here and the metal holes that they fit into may have contracted a bit. Just be patient and they'll go in. That's it!! Oh, and plug it in for light.


The objectives are relatively parfocal, meaning when you switch between them you only have refocus using the fine-focus knobs a little. Great feature which makes using it even more of a pleasure. There is a dimmer switch for the LED, and also a diaphragm under the stage-which was half closed when shipped: slide it open for even more light. Again, if you don't know what these terms mean you should start researching 'how to use a microscope'.


Optics appear flat and focused edge-to-edge, which is the opposite of many telescope mirrors I deal with, but that's another story. Each eyepiece spins for diopter adjustment, and the eyepieces slide apart for interpupillary adjustment. Focus with one eye closed using the focus knobs, then switch eyes and focus that eye buy turning that eyepiece itself. Now open both eyes: both will be focused but you'll have double vision: slide the eyepieces further and closer apart. At some point the double vision goes away and in a snap you get a very wide-field view: a single view. It a little like those 'magic eye' optical illusion posters: once you get it-you get it. But it might take a few minutes of fiddling.


I love this microscope, and wished I had bought it years earlier.

On the left side, under the stage is a little black knob that raises and lowers the condenser. Once you've focused--use this knob to back the condenser away from the slide and you'll increase contrast. This helps a lot, especially when things are too washed out with light--and it increases contrast--where just dimming the LED would make everything darker and harder to see.

Basically this is a 'real' microscope, and you should learn how to operate it in the proper manner to use it at its fullest. With that said, except for the 4th lens they throw in (oil immersion) a little kid could easily figure out all the features. There is supposed to be a slip of paper with address to download a manual-but I didn't see it. There are tons of Omax videos on you tube if you need help.

So, what did I look at with my awesome new telescope? You'd think since I live thirty feet from the Rouge River I'd take a water sample like we did in 5th grade and check that out, but no. I ordered some diatomaceous earth from eBay via a vendor named armed_forces_insignia. I received a two packets of white powder very similar to the stuff you dump into swimming pool filters and gardens to kill snails, actually it's pretty much the exact same stuff except one packet was freshwater diatoms and the other were from salt water locales.

I found this round little diatom with my microscope. I believe it is a variety of stephanodiscus. Diatoms are tiny hard shelled beasts that make up diatomaceous earth. Soft-skinned bugs also hate crawling across these (dead) things because they're shells are like broken glass so people use this in their gardens. They come in gillions of different shapes and collecting them can be a life-time hobby. A hobby you can keep on just a microscope slide or two.

Here are some barrel-shaped diatoms from the same samples. This is even more fun than stamp collecting!

I took a video of this cute little guy, gal? It was in the murky tap water that my avocado-pit growing in a styrofoam cup. 

This is the inside of a regular old poppy seed that I left on a wet piece of paper towel for a couple days! You can see the life waiting to jump out of it!

The last three photographs show increasing magnification of some yellowish-green pollen that coated my car in Metro Detroit on 5-17-2015. You can see that as the magnification goes up it gets harder to focus on the entire piece of pollen: microscopes love flat things under cover slips--they have a hard time with "3-d" objects. Be warned, even the ink laying on top of a dollar bill looks like a huge cliff under high magnification. You can usually feel the ink on crisp, new dollar bill--under a microscope you can see the massive depth of the ink on top of the paper and you can only focus on the ink or the paper, not both.

Finally, here are some cat hairs at 1200x under my Omax microscope. 

Remember, if you put a cover slip over these hairs and a dollup of oil on top of that you can ram the oil immersion scope into this and get 2000x magnification! Anything you can grab and fit under your microscope can end up being really cool to look at.

Meow!

see atomic particles with your own eyes

So you wanna see atomic particles with your own eyes huh? Here's how to do it easily!

Just build a nuclear cloud chamber...for around $7.

Cloud chambers let you see paths left by radioactive particles as they pass through a supersaturation of alcohol vapor. Vapor trails are formed when the radiation ionizes the alcohol mist super-cooled and formed by dry ice under the aquarium while the top of the aquarium drizzles the propanol (very pure rubbing alcohol you must never touch, or Everclear grain alcohol would probably work, as would methyl alcohol like Heet fuel additive). I went with a $7 bottle of 99.9% pure rubbing alcohol. Caution: the 70% stuff at drugstores won't work.

Alpha particles, and beta and gamma rays leave different looking trails in the mist; as do muons, positrons, cosmic rays, electron collisions;--basically ions. X-rays, bremsstrahlung (braking) radiation and annihilation radiation arising from positrons interacting with electrons basically behave like gamma rays.  Some trails are long and thin, some are short and fat, some branch out like lightening: each path can tell you the exact type of particle that just whizzed by! Yes, you can actually see the tracks they rip through the mist. You can even use a strong magnet and "bend" the path of some particles.

What I used: 10 gallon aquarium; metal roof flashing; stiff wire/coat hangers; styrofoam block; socks; wire to use as tie-wraps; 99.9% rubbing alcholol; DRY ICE and some radioisotope AM-241 from an ionic chamber type smoke detector ($5 at any store). AM-241 is Americium (pronounced Amer-eh-SHE-um). You'll see the Am-241 in the video, it's just a flat silver disk that is INSANELY RADIOACTIVE, yet it mostly shoots out 

Don't get confused AM has a number of 95 on the Periodic Table, but this is one of its isotopes (241). Am-241 is so radioactive that all the "harmless" alpha particles is shoots out are so plentiful it actually damages the crystal structure of the element itself! This is like the damage that radioactive particles can do to your DNA to cause cancer. In addition to tons of alpha particles it also emits some gamma particles as well. My Geiger counter can't see alpha particles--just beta, gamma and x-rays and even so it reads around 300 clicks per minute! 

MANY PEOPLE ONLINE SAY THAT AM-241 FROM A SMOKE DETECTOR ONLY PUTS OUT A FEW GAMMA PARTICLES AND THE REST IS SAFE ALPHA. THEY OBVIOUSLY DON'T OWN GEIGER COUNTERS AND CANNOT ANSWER WHEN YOU ASK THEM TO QUANTIFY THE GAMMA RADIATION. 

So do your own homework, buy a $99 Geiger counter (I use a GQ GMC-300e Plus) and don't believe everything on the internet, it can get you killed. At 300cpm what is dangerous gamma particles in this piece of AM-241 is only slightly worse than two of my old glow-in-the-dark wristwatches from the 1930s. Still, the danger is there.

BUILDING THE BEAST

Here's how I did it. Cut a recess in a foam block to hold the dry ice.

Make a wire frame inside an aquarium to hold the socks that we'll douse with 99.9% rubbing alcohol. The long pieces will go near the glass bottom. The aquarium will be upside down with the socks at the top when the unit is working.

Put the socks on and tie them with thin wire. Rubber bands will melt from the alcohol and break from the dry ice. Just use wire bread bag wraps if that's all you can find.

The aquarium's glass bottom is now it's glass top.

I fit the the aquarium on the glass block so it was air-tight and put a piece of THIN metal roof flashing between the dry ice and the inside of the cloud chamber. It looks black here because I had it covered, but it didn't work so I uncovered it. In the video it's bright shiny metal.

I put the dry ice in the hollowed out recess in the foam block. I doused the socks with alcohol. Put the AM-241 on the metal plate. I put the metal plate on the dry ice and the aquarium over everything.

Next I added a light bulb on top of the glass carefully since these 99.9% alcohol vapors are highly inflammable. The light bulb was to add WARMTH to the top of the aquarium while the bottom was super-cooled by the dry ice. This creates the fog of alcohol vapors at the bottom for the particles to leave trails through.

In the video (which gets better halfway through because I re-position the light) you'll see a half-sphere dome of fog over the AM-241 disk and a flower-like cascade of alpha particle trails shooting off the disk. The unit only worked for about 10 minutes after 2 hours of trying. Oddly, even though everyone says it needs to be airtight--the unit only started working once I gave up and started to dismantle it. Once some warmer air hit the inside the fog formed and I started seeing trails!

This could mean that the whole aquarium was too cold. At one point I put a bucket of hot water on top of the aquarium to increase the temperature differential, but it didn't seem to help. I filmed it for a few seconds, and then spent a few minutes silently watching with a smile on my face. 

Almost everything I scavenged for free, including the smoke detector's AM-241. The 99.9% rubbing alcohol was $7 and all gone when I was done. I got the dry ice from the Melvindale Public Library where I work: we had an open house and children's bookmark drawing award ceremony and we had dry ice left over from the ice cream we served. I knew that we'd have dry ice left over, so I ordered the alcohol and built the nuclear cloud chamber a couple weeks before the event. So I guess this is a $7 cloud chamber.

And that's how you can "see" atomic particles. It's a lot more fun than those golf-ball diagrams in your textbooks and tinker toy balls and connectors: like Coca-Cola this is the REAL THING; and it won't give you cavities...but it might give you radiation poisoning...

Galileo Galilei Square Cube Law

Galileo Galilei Square Cube Law

Science is written in this great book: the Universe, which stands continually open to our gaze.

-Galileo

OK, I had to give my Geiger counter a break to recharge.

What we have here in my notebook is an awesome little thing Galileo wrote about: take a cube and dice it into smaller cubes: the total volume stays the same, but the surface area keeps growing the more cubes you dice. 

The volume of each little cube is 1/8 the big cube but is surface area is larger at 1/4 the big cube. Volume drops faster than surface area. Weight drops faster than surface area. Weight drops faster than aerodynamic drag (wind resistance). Thus dust floats.

It’s called Galileo’s “Square-Cube Law” and is found in his work “Two New Sciences”. I got my copy from a free book-bin at my local library. I guess they couldn’t find any takers for the .25cents they wanted at their booksale.

A1 = original surface area and A2 = new surface area.

V1 = original volume and V2 = new volume.

L1 = original length and L2 = new length.

Ugh, it was a short post but it got all mathy at the end. Meow.

Yes, you can get great deals on Uranium these days

Yes, you can get great deals on Uranium these days

My (smallest) Geiger counter is a GQ GMC-300e that was $99. It reads beta, gamma and xray radiation. It doesn't do alpha, if it did then this Uranium sample from Lisbon Valley Utah would be about 40% higher! The video was short because as the Geiger got so hot I wanted to move away at high speed.

The final reading was 6200 clicks per minute. My antique radium painted wristwatch was only 220cpm or so! These are very, very hot rocks-like that old film noir movie "Kiss Me Deadly" from the 50s, minus the howling noise.

No relation to the awesome Lita Ford song of the same name.

This sample is unrefined uranium ore. I've tested a few old wristwatches and found Radium in them. Back in the old days companies would paint Radium on watches and clocks and other things to make them glow in the dark! A lot of workers who did the painting died awful deaths, but not before developing disfiguring tumors. A famous group are known as the "Radium Girls" who would purse their lips on their paintbrushes to get a real fine, pointed tip to paint the clock faces with more precision. Turns out putting radioactive brushes in your mouth is a bad idea. Radium is very similar to calcium, it has a bad habit of swapping places with the calcium in your bones and causing massive health problems.


Alpha particles are stopped by your skin. Even a sheet of paper will stop them so Geiger counters that can detect alpha radiation are more open and this fragile: the plastic case on my Geiger is more than enough to block all alpha even if it was sensitive to it. To stop beta radiation you'd need a sheet of aluminum. Gamma and x-rays blast through all sorts of things but are significantly stopped (but not totally) by lead. Surprisingly, scientists disagree on the definition of what constitutes gamma vs X-rays.

I got interested in radioactive things when I fixed an old antique watch. I fell asleep with it on and in the dark noticed that the hands weren't "glowing" but we're actually sparkling! It was so weird that I researched and found that the watch was painted with Radium. On the bottom of the face near the 6 o'clock position was a tiny "Ra" that could only be seem with a magnifying glass. Ra=Radium. Deadly, deadly radium.

After getting me Geiger counter I found another, unlabeled, watch that was even more radioactive in my collection.


Recently I ordered the uraninite ore from LifeTech and they sent it out properly packed and with no problems. It is way more radioactive than my old wristwatches.

So, besides listening to the tell-tale clicking of the Geiger counter what can you do with radioactive minerals and such? Well, my next post will be about the cool Nuclear Cloud Chamber that let's you see the trails left by the path of radioactive particles zinging through a cloud of supercooled alcohol vapor-the best part of that it is super cheap and easy to make!

How did I get interested in radioactive stuff? Well, shown above are my gold Lord Elgin Swiss watch with Radium glowing hands and hour markers and a Uranium laced glass marble. I got the watch for free in a box of 'junk' at a garage sale. I fell asleep while wearing it and in the darkness brought it up to my eyes to see. It was then I noticed that it wasn't just 'glowing' in the dark it was 'sparkling'!!!! This sparkling was a scintillation every few seconds, like a weird mini-lightening strike: kind of slow, like when a big lightening bolt takes a while to branch out in the sky. I did a little research and found out my cool gold watch was radioactive--and the reason it was is that the hands were painted with Radium, sometimes written near the 6 o'clock position as 'Ra'.

The Uranium glass marble changes color in sunlight due to, well: Uranium in the glass. Many antique (and new) glass contains Uranium for this color-changing effect. Uranium glass is also called "Vaseline Glass". It's all slightly radioactive. So are thorium laced gas lantern mantles for camping. The little sock looking wick is radioactive. 

Fiestaware ceramic bowls and plates (especially the red colored ones) are so radioactive that people break them into pieces and sell them to Geiger counter owners like me as a test source!

Name      What is it?                                                                           Distance traveled 
                                                                                                                    through open air
Alpha       Physical particle equaling a Helium nucleus                        2-3cm

Beta          Physical particle equaling an electron                                    2-3m

Gamma    Not radioactive decay, just energy burst                                500m
                   accompanying alpha or beta radiation.
                   The same as an x-ray, but arising from
                   different sources.

Neutron     Physical particle made up of 1 up quark and                   1000s of meters
                     2 down quarks.


Name   Symbol     Makeup                           Charge         Speed       Atomic Mass Units
Alpha     α             2 protons & 2 Neutrons       + +                Slow                               4

Beta        β               1 electron                                -              Fast or Slow                1/2000

Gamma  γ                Photons/                           Neutral        Speed of light                   0
                           electromagnetic waves

Neutron n           1 up & 2 down quarks         Neutral      2.2km/S-14,000km/S         1
                                                                                                 (~5% speed of light)

Notes: 

An AMU (Atomic Mass Unit) is equal to 1/12 the mass of a Carbon-12 atom. 

Slow Neutrons are called "Thermal" and fast ones are called "Fast" neutrons. 

An alpha particle is double positive "++". 

Gamma rays are produced by atomic nuclei and x-rays are created by accelerating electrons, but they are basically the same type of wave energy. 


Lead only approximately halves the gamma/x-ray amounts. A 1/2" of lead stops about half the waves trying to get through. When beta radiation hits lead sometimes a new type of radiation is created that is more dangerous! This is Bremsstrahlung radiation (braking/deceleration). Lead barely interacts with neutron radiation, water or hydrogen-containing compounds such as common paraffin wax are much better shielding material.


By the way, another great place to creep around and find info like this is the Oak Ridge National Lab at  https://libcat.ornl.gov/  which has tons of DECLASSIFIED reports of various techniques for radioactive fun. The directory names look like years, but the files inside them are all scrambled up--so just poke around. A cool file I found was "The Preparation, Properties, and Uses of Americium - 241, Alpha-, Gamma-, and Neutron Sources." 

Afocal Astrophotography (is really simple)!

Afocal Astrophotography (is really simple)!

What follows is an afocal astrophotograph I took of Saturn. Afocal astrophotograph is a fancy term for just sticking a camera up to where you normally put your eye to look through the telescope. Afocal: just held up to the regular eyepiece of a telescope, or microscope or binoculars. Astrophotography: when you aim at something in the sky that isn’t a bird or plane. It’s that simple! 



Here is the resulting photography through my 8” Zhumell reflector (mirror, not lens) Dobsonian (mounted on a lazy-susan swivel) telescope. I was using a high magnification eyepiece. I think it was my 3mm Zhumell Planetary eyepiece. That’s why it’s dark and kind of fuzzy. The smaller the mm number in a telescope eyepiece: the higher the magnification (zoom in) but the less light and less sharpness you’ll get:

And that photo above (on a 19" screen) is about as small, but crisp as it was looking with my eyeball through the telescope too! Depending where Saturn is in relationship to earth the rings can be edge-on and almost invisible or more titled so we can see them better. Also, Saturn and all the other planets change in apparent size depending on time of year and how close/far they are from planet Earth.

Later, I took around 10 seconds of jittery, crappy hand-held video and then registered (lined up) and stacked (piled on top of each other) the resulting video frames using RegiStax. RegiStax is a FREE awesome astrophotography program. It took me about 4 hours to download and install it (mostly just the downloading took a crazy amount of time). What’s cool is that when I went back to look at the raw video it was so shaky that Saturn was only in the viewfinder for about 3 seconds. So, 3 seconds of blurry Saturn stacked up and throwing away 7 seconds of darkness.

Directly above this is a video taken through one of my telescopes. The telescope is locked in position. The sideways movement of Saturn is due to the spinning of the Earth. The up-and-down bumps are from the slight wind moving the whole apparatus.

After taking the 10 seconds of video, I imported it and then played around in RegiStax. Once I got my preferred settings in RegiStax I set it to process, that took about 40 minutes. The result was it transformed crumby, shaky low-res video from a 1990s Fuji Finepix 4700 digital camera into this blast of awesomeness:

Notice how you can see at the bottom right where the sphere of the planet actually casts a shadow on the lower part of the ring as it passes behind the planet! You can also barely make out differences in the rings (darker colors).

RegiStax is a FREE (but long) download available here: http://www.astronomie.be/registax/ You’ll want to install it on a desktop because it is HUGE and powerful program. Think PhotoShop for 3-dimensions.

Harsher processing (different settings) with RegiStax of the same 316 frames of video stacked on top of each other:

Because I was sick of holding my old camera (a 1990s Fuji FinePix 4700 'Silver Brick' that I had since college) up to the eyepiece I made a cheesy but free afocal astrophotography bracket out of scraps:

Here is this crazy apparatus mounted on my old tiny telescope. The red ring between the camera and eyepiece is a reel from some white Teflon plumber's tape. It was the perfect size for my old telescope and it's lousy little .9" eyepieces (see below about eyepiece sizes).

It's important to note the different physical sizes of telescope eyepieces and how that obviously makes mounting a camera a real pain! If you want to change magnification you have to change the eyepiece.

The little eyepiece in my hand to the left is what you're probably used to in toy store telescopes and microscopes. It's a .9" Japanese size eyepiece. Tiny, not so great usually. Next to it is some 1.25" format eyepieces. Now we're talking! Better telescopes can accept 2" eyepieces and 1.25" eyepieces with an adapter. Professional quality eyepieces are 1.25" and 2". 

Here is my HUGE Zhumell Z8 telescope with a 2" format eyepiece mounted in it (to the right and higher than the Pepsi can). It has a frosted white plastic dust cover on it and yes it IS almost as big as the Pepsi can!! It's actually heavier than an unopened can of soda (in Michigan we call soda "pop").

You didn't believe me when I told you my telescope eyepieces are as big as a pop can did ya?

If you have a Dobsonian-mounted telescope (on a spinning lazy susan style mount) a great user upgrade modification is what I did to my Zhumell Z8 shown here. Mount in on a milkcrate and cut holes on either side of the mount. These mods accomplish a few things: with the addition of a rubber bumper on the bottom of the tube (so it doesn't bang into the mounting as hard) I can now push the telescope tube upright, then bear hug the whole telescope and grab it by the two new huge holes. I push my chest into the tube which mashes it tightly against the mount (and rubber bumper) Yes, I carry my entire telescope out the door in one piece instead of multiple trips! No more carrying the base, then the tube and trying to assemble them in the darkness. The huge pieces I cut out where also pretty heavy, meaning I have less weight to deal with all around, which is nice. The milkcrate just makes it higher so I don't have to lean down and get a backache or migraine while using the scope. 

The other piece of advice that really, really helps when using this type of reflector telescope has to do with colimation (lining up the primary and secondary mirrors with eachother, and then lining up the eyepiece--all using a laser). Whenever you make adjustments to the secondary mirror mount screws or the thumbscrews of the primary mirror (but not the locking screws) always try to tighten them to get to where you want things aligned. At first I would loosen one side and tighten another. Once I shifted to always tightening, after a few nights of use and colimation things were so tight that they telescope didn't need to be colimated at all! Things just tended to stay put...and that's after the bear hug and walking down stairs and out a door and down stairs of a stone paver patio!  

So, do you have an old Tasco telescope? It's a great telescope with two deadly flaws (that you can fix). For a few dollars you can order a new eyepiece mechanism that will allow you to put 1.25" eyepieces in your telescope! I did this and was blown away by the quality increase when using my good eyepieces in what I thought was a bad telescope. Tasco telescopes are optically fine, they're eyepieces are totally crumby though. 

The second deadly flaw is their criminally negligent telescope mounts (tripods). They're just awful and probably were the main reason that 99% of their telescopes end up "used only a few times, asking $10 for it".  Find a way to stabilize the mount and you'll love the telescope. This may entail wood and metal working, or haunting charity resale shops (Salvation Army, Disabled American Vets) for a deal on a better mount. For $5 I found a fancy equatorial telescope mount, twenty pounds of counterweights and best part was--it came with my old telescope tube! Yep, the grey telescope I took many cool photos with was only $5 for the scope, great mount with weights and a pile of mediocre eyepieces and other stuff! 

I highly recommend the DAV Thrift Store at 8050 N Middlebelt Rd, Westland, MI 48185! The workers are also SUPER NICE!!! They work for charity to help disabled veterans. Probably my favorite place on Earth besides Costco and my own house.

I also like my binoculars big, and mounted on tripods. Above are a pair of great Konus binos I scored cheap off of Amazon brand new.


In later posts I’ll detail my: spectrometers (a few homemade and a store-bought one); infrared experiments and my favorite hobby of all: staring at the sun! Until then just know this: no matter how cheap a telescope or microscope or binoculars you have you can usually stick your camera (even a cellphone camera) up to the eyepiece and take cool pictures afocally. 



For the desktop or laptop Stellarium is a great astronomy tool: stars, planets, space junk and satellites visible from Earth are all easy to find using this software. They charge for the mobile app but desktop version is free and way more powerful. I have it on my phone but always seem to use the free app SkEye, which lets me scroll around and even attach my phone to my telescope and it tells me which way to swing the scope to view my target object. There is an align function that's easy: point telescope at a known object, scroll on screen and tap the object. Do that a couple times and your phone and telescope act as one! 


Remember, telescopes are just light buckets: the bigger the bucket the more light you grab. The eyepieces do the focusing and magnifying (zooming in). In my big 8" telescope looking at the moon is actually a little too bright and painful. I have to squint. Good thing we don't have super-sensitive cat's eyes.

The moon is so bright that most astronomers don't bother to use their telescopes when it's visible because, much like the sun, it drowns out the stars in the sky. Even the ancients were both awed and annoyed by the moon:

The stars about the lovely moon fade back and vanish very soon, when round and full her silver face swims into sight and lights all space.

Sappho

Meow!