When you focus upon a star…

I took the binoc­u­lars out into the yard tonight for some plan­e­tary obser­va­tion. Fol­low­ing my father’s advice, I focused the binoc­u­lars on a star before look­ing at Venus and despite the dif­fi­cul­ty get­ting the image to stay still I could make out the cres­cent shape. It looks like Venus is get­ting much clos­er to its tran­sit of the Sun. I think that Venus will start get­ting less bright in the sky as the cres­cent gets thin­ner. Of course it will also get hard­er to observe as its set­ting time comes clos­er to sunset.

Using GoSky­Watch I saw that Mars and Sat­urn ought to be fair­ly high in the sky, so I propped the binoc­u­lars up with my elbow to see if I could dis­cern any­thing. My yard has lim­it­ed vis­i­ble sky but both Sat­urn and Mars were there, Sat­urn look­ing amber and Mars of course with its red tint.

It was near­ly impos­si­ble to get any­thing like a sta­ble image. I spent near­ly a half hour try­ing dif­fer­ent posi­tions and refo­cus­ing on stars, then return­ing to Sat­urn. I hoped I could make out rings, but nev­er did. Every time I adjust­ed the dis­tance between the eye­cups I had to read­just the focus again. And when the focus was good the image bounced around so much that at any moment I saw a squig­gle rather than a point. The most still I got the binoc­u­lars I still saw the image jump in rhythm with my own heart­beat. If my own pulse was enough to ruin observ­ing, I need a tripod.