{"id":21,"date":"2006-01-03T21:39:00","date_gmt":"2006-01-03T21:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/?p=21"},"modified":"2011-07-07T01:00:02","modified_gmt":"2011-07-07T00:00:02","slug":"an-early-christmas-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/?p=21","title":{"rendered":"An early Christmas present"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the nights got longer in late November, I finally bought a telescope. I had one loaned to me briefly when I was doing GSCE Astronomy at school and was also able to use the Manor Road observatory when I was Leicester University.<\/p>\n

My new ‘scope is similar to the one I had at school. It’s a Skywatcher Explorer 150<\/a> – a 6″ Newtonian Reflector on an equatorial mount.<\/p>\n

I’ve had the ‘scope for about 6 weeks now and of course on most of evenings when I might have used it the sky was cloudy. But I’ve had a couple of decent clear evenings now.<\/p>\n

Mars is well-placed at the moment and Venus was a pretty good evening object in December but you had to be quick or it disappeared behind the trees soon after the Sun had set.<\/p>\n

I hope to look at the Moon next and some clusters.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the nights got longer in late November, I finally bought a telescope. I had one loaned to me briefly when I was doing GSCE Astronomy at school and was also able to use the Manor Road observatory when I was Leicester University. My new ‘scope is similar to the one I had at school. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-astronomy"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6dbnw-l","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":363,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ianridley.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}