Group Observation at Suncoast Community Church

From 7:40-9:00 I observed with the group and Mr. Percy at the church. It took a while to get the telescope set up, but when it was, we first observed Jupiter and its four moons. The first three moons appear closer to Jupiter, orbiting it in almost even rings around the moon (or at least that's what it looked like), but the fourth moon, Callipto, was much farther away from the planet. When we put a higher intensity eyepiece into the telescope, we could more easily percieve the two dark bands on the planet. With my binoculars (7x35 mag, or 580 at 1000 ft), I could see a few moons outside Jupiter but with difficulty - if I hadn't know they were there, I would have assumed that the moons were just fuzzy dots because I couldn't stay still. Mr. Percy used a green laser to point out Constellations and we could easily see: Scorpius, the teapot/Sagittarius, Cepheus, Andromeda, the Square Pegasus, Hercules, the constellations Altair, Cygnus, Lyra and more importantly their stars for the Summer Triangle. The constellations are much bigger than I thought, and you can actually see all of them in a field as opposed to at my house, where there are too many trees to see clearly.
Through the telescope we also observed Epsilon lyrae, Albiero (beta Cygnie, where we looked for the different colors of the stars - the fainter one was blue, the brighter one more yellow-white). Through my binoculars I could also see M31, a galaxy and a satellite galaxy next to it. I didn't realize you could see so much more with the binoculars, but I saw nebulas and galaxies with them.

It was pretty rockin' awesome.