Reply To: Last night’s planetary observations

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#612644

I too am passionate about planetary observation. I first saw Jupiter with its 4 satellites through a self-made telescope (the one in the attached photograph. I was totally penniless, not even money for the cinema). It was a cardboard tube with two lenses. As objective an old biconvex spectacle lens (+ 2 diopters) d30 mm, the eyepiece made with a small lens from a wire counter produced about 25X. The finder had been given to me a few days earlier. Red and blue colours were abundant, but I saw the planet as Galileo had seen it in 1610: orange luminosia star in the centre and four small stars almost aligned. I enjoyed telling everything to some classmates at school and to the Italian and literature teacher. We were studying the meaning of Don Ferrante in the novel I Promessi Sposi by A. Manzoni. It was a cold, clear winter evening. I had no gloves and at a certain point I could no longer feel my fingers. A wonderful memory that still excites me after so many years.

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