Can I just use my oscilloscope to measure the voltage across a capacitor or will I need a function generator for that?
For some reason it shows what looks to be like a capacitor charging if I am not mistaken.
Here is the picture of the circuit:
Picture of the simulation:
Trying to reproduce the results I get this:
You can, and you did.
Largely this was possible because you used storage scope.
If you had only an analog scope available, then to keep an image on the screen you would have likely needed to repeat the same experiment over and over, alternately charging and discharging the capacitor using a square wave source.
You also appear to have chosen a small enough resistor that the RC time constant was brief enough to accomplish a full charge during the first tentative contact you (manually?) made. It's quite possible that first tentative contact did not last but rather "bounced" however your scope sweep is so fast that your entire charging process may have occurred between the first tentative contact and any temporary disconnect, as there seems to be no "hesitation" in the charging curve.
And you selected a trigger which well captured the event of interest.
My question is can I just use my oscilloscope to measure the voltage across a capacitor
Of course, you can.
But there's one thing to consider: There's a circuit consisting of passive elements inside the scope's probe. And, in your circuit, you are loading the capacitor with those elements. So the measurement can be affected by these elements.
Your circuit looks like this:
simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab
And a 10:1 scope probe's circuit looks like this:
Img Src
I can't see the values from the photo and I can't even make a guess. But I should say that if R1 in your circuit is too large (i.e. in MegaOhms range) then the measurement can be inaccurate as the resistors inside the probe circuit form a divider with R1.
