Oct 17 2009
setting up the free IYA2009 telescope
At the start of this year, my school was lucky to be awarded one of 1000 free telescopes by the Society for Popular Astonomy. The telescopes for schools competition was designed to mark the International Year of Astronomy 2009, which celebrates Galileo first lifting a telescope upwards to view the night sky.
The telescope did not arrive at my school until April, by which time the night sky was becoming quite light. So, although the telescope was assembled, it has sat in a corner of my classroom for the past 6 months. Now that the dark evenings have returned, I felt it was time to try out the telescope.
I took it home for the October holidays and have been waiting for a rain-free day to set it up outside. Today was the first day with suitable weather and I set the telescope up in my front garden to align the finder scope as best as I could. If the sky remains clear, I am planning to go out with the telescope tonight to have a look at Jupiter and the other few objects whose name I know.
I used my mobile phone to record the setting up process. The video below isn’t great quality but I think it manages conveys some of the steps involved in aligning the telescope.
