Found Neptune tonight for the first time ever in any scope, and Uranus for the second time in a non-goto scope!
No gotos or computers, just the coordinates and SkyAtlas 2000.0. And my 8" Dobbie of course.
Uranus was tricky because I could not correlate the star field to what was in the Atlas. There was this star in the finder where there should not have been one and it kept confusing me so I kept getting lost. Turned out of course that star was Uranus. Nice little blue disk.
Neptune was harder, because it's a lot fainter (one mag?), and it's tiny! It must be only a few times bigger than the resolving limit of the 8", so it takes a bit of looking to tell it apart from the diffraction images of stars.
I had a group up at the mapleton observatory tracking down Uranus last night with binoculars, charts and green lasers. They found it too, confirmed by goto with the C11 on losmandy They were one chuffed group.
The first time I imaged Uranus I used Starry Nights and eyeball, once I identified the pattern of stars naked eye, then the finder, then the eyepiece, then the CCD.
I visually observed Uranus and Neptune last new moon at Kulnura, but used the DSC's to help that time. They both looked quite nice, and most people there took the opportunity to look through my scope at them.
Both resolved to a disc, Neptune only barely of course.
Hey, if you're at a fairly dark site with good seeing and a 10" scope, try using really high power on Neptune. The weekend before last we spotted Neptune's satellite, Triton, in an Orion XT10 with a 3.5 Nagler for ~340x. Faint, but it was there!!!
Neptune has been eluding me since last year. Last night I sat down with the finder charts from 'Astronomy 2006 Australia" and searched until I found it's tiny disc. It's funny you know, but for me it's like any other type of faint, fuzzy visual astronomy: in that it takes forever to find something first time, but on subsequent attempts, it's much easier to spot. I mean that not only are you more familiar with the object's location, but your eye is much more adept at picking it out from its background. Like the old adage says: "the longer you look at something, the more you actually see".
I used my 30mm GSO SV to find the field, and tracked it down with a 19mm Panoptic. I then tried my 9mm UO Ortho, and a 6mm GSO plossl. The ortho resolved the disc well, but was not very contrasty. The seeing was not good enough for the 6mm; but the best image was obtained with the Panoptic barlowed 2X with my UO 2" barlow. Fantastic.
I found the same with Uranus, which only took a couple of minutes to find. The Panoptic (barlowed) gave the best result, with the ortho performing better on the larger, brighter disc of Uranus, than Neptune (or maybe it's just my eyes getting old!)
Great to find these beasts but try mapping their position over a period of time to see their movement among the stars. Its a great exercise or, take it one step further and photograph the same field and make an animated gif of it, I saw a demo of this last night at the WSAAG meeting where it was done on Pluto. Really brilliant.
You can pick out Uranus naked eye from my backyard : ) so it's easy for me.
But I do remember it took forever the first time for both Neptune and Uranus.
bagged Uranus and Neptune + charts 4 u
Nice little blue disk.
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They were one chuffed group.
