It is easy to get seduced by the world you see ever day of your life. The Sun rises, and Sets, and many are not even aware of a similar motion of the stars, or the march of the moon around the sky. Yet all it takes is to open the minds eye and translate one frame of reference into another and you get so much more of a fantastical view of things. The pulse of the solar system, as it spins within our galaxy, within the Milky Way.
Maybe one of the funkier ways to do this is to get a telescope to track the stars all night long, then realize that the telescope is not really moving, well in orientation at any rate, and that all you are really looking at is the Earth spinning in the foreground.
To make things even more fun you can look across to our nearest gas giant neighbor, the mighty Jupiter, one of the brightest objects in the sky! Even the smallest of telescopes will show you its moons, and reveal Jupiter as a disk: indeed even a modern camcorder (2010) on ~60x zoom will show the moons of Jupiter! Modest telescopes, 3-6 in (75-150mm) will reveal structure on Jupiters cloud tops and show the shadows of the transiting moons. Jupiter rotates quickly, about once every 8 hrs, which in principal means its possible to watch an entire rotation of the planet over a single evening.
In this case I used a CPC11, a fairly sophisticated telescope (~3000 bucks), I forget the eyepiece, but a tele-extender and a 2 year old HD camera (vixia HF10 ~$300 now). Turns out this setup was far from ideal, but it was kinda thrown together in middle of nowhere. Problem was to get the right magnification, the image was too bright (newer camcorder have better brightness ranges, but I didnt have the right adaptor to mount a newer camcorder), so I had to put a lunar filter in the optical train, and then correct the color in editing. After that take about 10 seconds of video, and import it into a program called Registax, a wavelet based, quasi-adaptive optics based image enhancement program. Its free, and the developers deserve a lot of kudos for their efforts on this.
For the record, the nights seeing was not particularly good, as is evident from the high cloud that comes in later on the timelapse, and so the results here are well below optimal, however I was traveling at the time and had limited windows of opportunity, and it takes a night of work to do something like this. Really I should have done this from a dark and stable site, but there just wasn't the opportunity.
And now comes the point where you can really put it all together, a nights observing, and the telescope tracking Jupiter, then make a timelapse of both Jupiter and the telescope tracking it, and superimpose one on the other, and you have a whole rotation of Jupiter, as seen from the terrestrial merry-go-round. Further I really lucked out here, with both Io giving a show of a transit, at the same time the Great Red Spot arced around the planet!
Cute thing is that with 4 telescopes at good observing sites around the world, a little automation, and you could get 6 months continuous footage like this each year. Further a telescope in a higher earth orbit, or out in the LaGrange points could basically relay continuous footage like this.... however thats really a project for someone with real funding :-)
(or maybe a project for next year!)
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