Over a year ago, I placed an order for a 20" Dobsonian telescope. Last Tuesday, I finally received the message that I could pick it up on Friday. Unlike the usual equipment curse implies, the weather was forecasted to be perfect (also in terms of seeing) for the weekend.
@Tom Williams and I had already made plans to take the Dob to 2500m above sea level together. After a quick chat, we both decided that we had to do it on this weekend!
So Tom, who lives in the UK, managed to book a flight to Germany on Friday, and I picked up the telescope in Karlsruhe. On Saturday, we spent almost the entire day setting it up in my backyard, getting to know its quirks and collimating it. All of this work was instantly rewarded as we had almost perfect seeing conditions during the night. That's when we captured the image of Jupiter above.
On the following day, we packed everything up and headed to a 2500m mountain peak called Edelweißspitze in Austria. The first few hours of the night were a little windy and very cold. The seeing conditions were really good again, but the wind kept shaking the telescope, which didn't make it easy to properly image Saturn. Later on, the wind calmed down, and we had some really nice views of Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune.
Live view of Jupiter from my backyard:
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