Live Stream 2023/12/07 - Seestar S50
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Here are some notes to go along with the live stream.
Here are a few recent things I've shot with my Seestar S50 in the past few days. If any of this looks interesting, I highly recommend it. You can check out my affiliate link.
Planets
Planets are fairly small in the sky, and this telescope has a fairly wide angle, so you're not going to get a lot of detail.
I had always wanted to see this visually, but never got it together. Thanks to the Goto mounts you have in a lot of modern scopes, it was trivial. You can see the blue tint of the planet.
Deep Sky targets
The conditions have been fairly challenging as of late. Not many fully clear nights. And my view of the sky is massively constrained.
The "M" objects I refer to are Messier objects. One of the first astronomical catalogs from the beginning of the telescope age. They're usually easily visible in small telescopes (since they were cataloged 200 years ago that makes sense), but in massively light polluted skies they're harder to see visually.
Sun and plane
How did I do it? It's not super complicated. I set the telescope outside, and had my phone with the app. I pulled up FlightRadar24 which shows real time flight information.
(Show diagram of the sun vs plane vs you.) Also, direction. So in northern hemisphere, sun will be to south this time of year. Altitude vs distance. Sun will be up to 50 degrees above horizon. I could be more precise but I wasn't, so I just eyeballed it. Higher plane is, farther south it will have to be. But there's a limit. If plane is at cruising altitude, that's about 7 miles up. So plane would have to be within 7 miles. Rather than doing the calculation each time, I just would hit record when plane entered "the box" (a rough rectangle south of my house), and hit stop after it was out of the box.
I actually missed the plane going through with this video, but saw some weird turbulence in the video. I wound it back and realized I had gotten it.