Stopped a guy at Kitt Peak who was taking phone pics through a telescope eyepiece

Back in 2018 I was at the Kitt Peak visitor center after dark. This older guy kept lining up his iPhone with the eyepiece on a loaner scope and getting nothing but blur. I walked over and showed him how to hold the phone steady with two hands and tap to focus. He got a clear shot of the Andromeda galaxy, not a great photo but you could see the shape. He told me he'd been trying for 20 minutes and was about to give up. He thanked me like three times and then showed the photo to his wife. Has anyone else had luck helping random people at public observatories?

3 comments

3 Comments

lilyp3728d agoMost Upvoted

And this is exactly what I notice everywhere right, people are so scared to ask for help that they'll bang their head against something for 20 minutes instead of just saying "hey can you show me." It's like we all think everyone else already knows how to do stuff and we're the only ones who don't, which is crazy because most people are just guessing too. Helping someone feels good for both of you, and I swear the person getting the help is usually way more relieved than embarrassed.

thomas_torres29d ago

Actually I gotta gently push back on calling it Andromeda galaxy from Kitt Peak in 2018. Kitt Peak is at 31 degrees north latitude, and Andromeda is only really visible in the fall and winter months from that spot. If this was 2018 and you didn't specify the season, it might have been something else like the Triangulum Galaxy or even a globular cluster like M13. I've been to Kitt Peak a few times and helped people with phone shots too, and most folks just assume anything fuzzy that's not a planet must be Andromeda. Still cool that you helped him get something though, the main thing is he walked away happy instead of frustrated.

the_mary29d ago

Wait hold on, you're saying it might not have even been Andromeda?! I mean I get that stars and stuff look different from different places but I seriously just assumed anything that blurry up there had to be the closest big galaxy. I remember him saying something about a "smudge" and we all just went with it. But you mentioning Triangulum actually makes me wonder now because that's way smaller and fainter right? I looked up at the sky that night but honestly I couldn't tell you what season it was, I just know it was chilly and we were all bundled up. Man this is kind of blowing my mind a little, all these years I've been telling people about this exact thing and now I'm second guessing everything. Still though, you're totally right that the kid was just happy to have something on his phone, that's what matters most.