$20 Emerson Telescope

Date: 2011-11-27  (UT)
Time: 05:15 +0000 roughly
Location:  Culloden, GA
Telescope:  45mm Emerson refractor at ~f/13
Magnification: 50x and 100x
Objects:  Sirius Alpha CMa, Jupiter, M42 Orion Nebula, Sirius, M31 Andromeda Galaxy, M45 Pleides
Seeing: 3 (1=worst, 5=best)
Atmosphere: Faint moving clouds, breezy

Today, at Walgreens, I found a cheap $20 telescope with the above specifications.  I thought it would be interesting to see just what one could do with such an inexpensive telescope.

The views were pretty horrible by normal standards.  There's an extreme pink/red hazy glow around a star, say Sirius, while the central disk was blue green.

M42 was appropriately hazy and viewable.   In a second observation (after spending some time looking at other objects) it had improved some.

For Jupiter two satellites were visible.

With a 28-mm aperture stop cut from an index card the image was noticeably sharper and the halo smaller though the extreme chromatic abberation was still present.

With the aperture stop added, we could see a third satellite about one Jupiter diameter away in the preceeding direction.

It was also possible to see the NEB and SEB occasionally as seeing varied.

We also tried the 6mm eyepiece for 100x and Jupiter was just as viewable without much increased abberation.

Only a portion of the Pleides was visible at a given time.

Putting the telescope on a real camera tripod instead of the super-flimsy tripod gave much better images and was the only way to point the telescope at objects above an estimated 75 deg altitude above the horizon.

I'm curious how to see the moon would look.