This album gathers pictures of the Sun, the Moon and Jupiter taken through a 10-inch Meade LX200 Classic Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope belonging to the University of Aberdeen. The telescope was first installed at the Cromwell Tower Observatory (CTO) in 2002 and was restored in 2023, mainly for teaching and outreach.
A Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope uses mirrors and a thin glass plate to fold the light back on itself, so a long focal length fits into a short, easy-to-handle tube. With its 10-inch (25 cm) mirror it collects well over a thousand times more light than the human eye, and the images here were recorded with an SVBONY SV505C colour camera in place of an eyepiece. Jupiter and the Moon come from short videos of 2,000 frames each, combined to reduce the blur caused by the air; the Sun is a single frame.
The album shows what a telescope of this size can do on our nearest neighbours in space: the cloud belts of Jupiter with its four largest moons, the craters and bright rays of the Moon, and sunspots and the bubbling texture of the Sun's surface, photographed through a safe solar filter. The Moon and Jupiter were photographed from Westhill, Aberdeenshire in December 2023, and the Sun from the roof of the Fraser Noble Building, University of Aberdeen, in June 2025.
Pictures from the University's larger 16-inch John Cruickshank Telescope at the Anne H Cruickshank Observatory are in separate albums.
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