Astronomy 101 - Moon and Jupiter

I recently purchased a telescope (AstroMaster 70AZ) from Amazon and gifted it to my wife (Juhi Ranjan) on her birthday. After days of waiting of a clear sky, we finally got our chance on 14th March, 13.

We had already adjusted our viewfinder in the daylight by focusing on objects, such as cars, at a distance of around 400 meters from our house. It was an amazing feeling to see distant objects in a clear and crisp manner.

We also had skymap installed on our mobile to locate various planetary bodies at night. We have a considerably big backyard and if there are no clouds we can have a visual treat to stars and most of the constellations. We live in Charlottesville and air is pretty clean here. Once we clear novice level, we can also reach out to McCormick Observatory which is a mile away from our house, but is located on a hill and gives a much better view of sky. 

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At night around 9pm, in chilling cold we took our telescope out. The moon was crescent shaped, which is supposedly the best time to see moon - it is the right amount of light (there could be other reasons as well, which I am not aware of). It was thrilling to locate various craters on the moon in the first go. Our telescope turned out to be very easy to set up and to focus once you have identified the objects. Here is a picture of what we saw at our first shot. Supposedly we can identify various parts of moon (including where Apollo landed) with the signature of craters or potholes it has. Will look out for sea of tranquility in my next attempt.

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Within 15 mins moon started sinking in trees and we realized that night moves faster when you are gazing sky. We moved to our next target - Jupiter. With naked eyes, it looked like a distinct shining object among pale stars in the sky. SkyMap certainly helped us in locating it at one go. Usually, we first try to locate an object with 10mm lens (came along with telescope) as it has a broader view area but lesser details than its counterpart 5mm lens. This time also after we located Jupiter in telescope and mounting the tripod firmly, we switched to 5mm lens and we could see Jupiter and its 4 moons in a perfect alignment. They were all very shiny and my eye started hurting within a min and I had to switch to the other one. But it was a spectacular view and I was glad that I could make it so far in my first attempt. We could also see a feeble ring separating Jupiter in 1:3 parts, and even though image shows it as a white object, it was sparkling different colors when I was looking through telescope.

In 30 mins of star gazing on a cold winter night (6 °C) our feet were like frozen. With lot of work at the desk, we decided to wrap it up and move inside. Adventure and curiosity has just begun!