Any stargazers in here? Telescope recommendations?
- Thread starter kes7
- Start date
Haha, well played. Yeah, Binoculars would work very well.
The suggestion I usually make to amateur astronomy noobs is to think long and hard about what your are really interested in doing or viewing with a new telescope, especially if they are looking at buying their very first telescope.
Buy on an impulse or in haste, you’ll likely regret the choice you made at your leisure and the telescope will become an ornament decorating the bedroom or the corner of the back room or the shed and collecting dust and cobwebs.
If you want portability and to look at wide fields (lots of stars, bright nebulae, bright galaxies) , it's hard to go pass a nice pair of 15x80 or 20x80 binoculars , and your average teenager or adult will have no problem handling these. If you decide you really aren’t into astronomy, you haven’t spent a lot and you’ve got great binos for fishing, hunting, birdwatching, and when you go on holidays.
If you are interested in mostly looking at the planets, moon (up close) and brighter nebulae and star clusters, a nice 80 to 100mm APO will give you a lot of satisfaction and fun, but you will need a good tripod and mount for it to get best viewing pleasure without the shakeys at power (100x - 200x), and note that the field of view at high powers (magnification, x) is very restricted.
If you want to see the planets, look at the moon (up close), look at fainter stars and fainter nebulae and galaxies then a nice 8 or 10" dobsonian will be an excellent investment (check out companies like Celestron, Meade, Orion and steer well clear of anything that says outrageous things about the telescope and department store and camera shop telescopes. Best to buy online from a reputable telescope shop or telescope e-shop or mail order telescope seller. Check out Sky and Telescope for suitable shops.
Then you need to think longer term, will you be interested in astrophotography and perhaps want to attach a camera of some sort to the telescope eventually ?
That will change your specifications (and the $ spent significantly), since you'll need a good equatorial mount of some kind (two kinds - fork or german) and good stable accurate / precise tracking of the stars requires a good equatorial ( minimum would be a EQ5, or CG5, or Vixen GP2D (SDX would be better), or LX75 and you will need a good solid tripod to go under it.
NB if you opt for a 10" dob you can adapt the telescope very easily for imaging at prime focus (by moving the main mirror closer to the focusor, replacing the stock focusor - probably a 1.25" rack and pinion - with a good low profile 2" crayford) , you might need a bigger diagonal too, and investing in a coma corrector lens (a Baader MFCC, these can be attached with a T-ring to any SLR or DSLR for a quick change over from visual to camera work) is an excellent investment, and you'll need to think about a more capable (BIGGER HEAVIER MORE HD) equatorial mount (Vixen SDX , Vixen Altux, a Losmandy G11, EQ6, or similar - starting to talk big $, but these come with fancy capabilities like GOTO and PEC and builtin autoguider ports and databases of objects you can select from and get the telescope to slew to automatically), and you need a guidescope to help either manually guide the main telescope or to help with autoguiding.
Note it will become a chore dragging out a big heavy mount with heavy counterweights and a heavy tripod (might be over 40 kg without the telescope), and then manhandling a large awkward telescope when setting up each night but if you are keen you'll not mind that.
Good advise is aways to look up the local astronomy club and find out when they meet and when the next outreach or field night is (great chance to talk to astronomers, check out some gear ,and to have a good squiz through a range of scopes – will be a great help in deciding what you REALLY want.
Astronomy and telescopes is like a black hole for your money, it'll just keep sucking money out of your pocket as you'll want all sorts of gadgets and bits and pieces and it's endless.
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Buy on an impulse or in haste, you’ll likely regret the choice you made at your leisure and the telescope will become an ornament decorating the bedroom or the corner of the back room or the shed and collecting dust and cobwebs.
If you want portability and to look at wide fields (lots of stars, bright nebulae, bright galaxies) , it's hard to go pass a nice pair of 15x80 or 20x80 binoculars , and your average teenager or adult will have no problem handling these. If you decide you really aren’t into astronomy, you haven’t spent a lot and you’ve got great binos for fishing, hunting, birdwatching, and when you go on holidays.
If you are interested in mostly looking at the planets, moon (up close) and brighter nebulae and star clusters, a nice 80 to 100mm APO will give you a lot of satisfaction and fun, but you will need a good tripod and mount for it to get best viewing pleasure without the shakeys at power (100x - 200x), and note that the field of view at high powers (magnification, x) is very restricted.
If you want to see the planets, look at the moon (up close), look at fainter stars and fainter nebulae and galaxies then a nice 8 or 10" dobsonian will be an excellent investment (check out companies like Celestron, Meade, Orion and steer well clear of anything that says outrageous things about the telescope and department store and camera shop telescopes. Best to buy online from a reputable telescope shop or telescope e-shop or mail order telescope seller. Check out Sky and Telescope for suitable shops.
Then you need to think longer term, will you be interested in astrophotography and perhaps want to attach a camera of some sort to the telescope eventually ?
That will change your specifications (and the $ spent significantly), since you'll need a good equatorial mount of some kind (two kinds - fork or german) and good stable accurate / precise tracking of the stars requires a good equatorial ( minimum would be a EQ5, or CG5, or Vixen GP2D (SDX would be better), or LX75 and you will need a good solid tripod to go under it.
NB if you opt for a 10" dob you can adapt the telescope very easily for imaging at prime focus (by moving the main mirror closer to the focusor, replacing the stock focusor - probably a 1.25" rack and pinion - with a good low profile 2" crayford) , you might need a bigger diagonal too, and investing in a coma corrector lens (a Baader MFCC, these can be attached with a T-ring to any SLR or DSLR for a quick change over from visual to camera work) is an excellent investment, and you'll need to think about a more capable (BIGGER HEAVIER MORE HD) equatorial mount (Vixen SDX , Vixen Altux, a Losmandy G11, EQ6, or similar - starting to talk big $, but these come with fancy capabilities like GOTO and PEC and builtin autoguider ports and databases of objects you can select from and get the telescope to slew to automatically), and you need a guidescope to help either manually guide the main telescope or to help with autoguiding.
Note it will become a chore dragging out a big heavy mount with heavy counterweights and a heavy tripod (might be over 40 kg without the telescope), and then manhandling a large awkward telescope when setting up each night but if you are keen you'll not mind that.
Good advise is aways to look up the local astronomy club and find out when they meet and when the next outreach or field night is (great chance to talk to astronomers, check out some gear ,and to have a good squiz through a range of scopes – will be a great help in deciding what you REALLY want.
Astronomy and telescopes is like a black hole for your money, it'll just keep sucking money out of your pocket as you'll want all sorts of gadgets and bits and pieces and it's endless.
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Hang onto them ! Especially the 2" barlow, 2" coma corrector, and 2" Lumicon deep sky filter !!! They are great gear to have (especially if the coma corrector is a TeleVue or a Lumicon - the Lumicon is the better !).
Hah, that would be quite awesome to see. Sounds like quite the project you have going on there
Kes, I wouldn't worry too much about using tools to make adjustments. For the most part, you'll only need to do your adjustments once. My 5" collapsible Dob doesn't require tools to adjust it for instance. And what really impressed me is that I didn't need to collimate it after taking it out of the box. It was mostly point and find, and it worked straight out of the box.
Wow. It must have a very good mounting.
Oh and I know all about those volumes. When we were at Stellafane a couple of years ago, my cousin won their whole catalogue of telescope making books and my Dad got the ones he didn't have already.
Too sweet!
My mirror grinding is at an impasse. I've ground an 8" and a 10"
--- sad story. My 10" was black vitrified ceramic with a near zero coeff. of thermal expansion. After I'd finished polishing and figuring it I was driving it to a friend's house in the county, laid carefully in my passenger seat. Some woman in front of me suddenly decided she was about to pass up her turn, slammed on her brakes, and when I was forced to do the same the mirror went slamming into the floorboard, hitting a hunk of steel and putting a couple big chips (the size of a thumb) in the surface.
Anyway, if I grind another mirror I want to go significantly bigger than my 13.1 inch scope, which means I'll have to make a grinding machine. That project is obviously going to be way down on the list behind all the other projects.
BTW, the 13.1" is an old Coulter Optical Odyessey One that my dad saw advertised in the local paper, not three weeks after I finished building my 8 inch. The seller had spent half a year on a waiting list, then found out it was too big to get in and out of his house. So he sold it for what he paid (about $400 in 1983), even though he'd added a Telrad finder. I modified it for 2-inch eyepieces, but otherwise haven't done much with it.
Oh, and I just noticed that Orion is selling a 50-inch Dobson for $123,000. I wonder what the story behind that is?
They wont be selling many of them. If any of them at all, not at that price.
Hah, that would be quite awesome to see. Sounds like quite the project you have going on there
Kes, I wouldn't worry too much about using tools to make adjustments. For the most part, you'll only need to do your adjustments once. My 5" collapsible Dob doesn't require tools to adjust it for instance. And what really impressed me is that I didn't need to collimate it after taking it out of the box. It was mostly point and find, and it worked straight out of the box.
Wow. It must have a very good mounting.
Too sweet!Oh and I know all about those volumes. When we were at Stellafane a couple of years ago, my cousin won their whole catalogue of telescope making books and my Dad got the ones he didn't have already.
My mirror grinding is at an impasse. I've ground an 8" and a 10"
--- sad story. My 10" was black vitrified ceramic with a near zero coeff. of thermal expansion. After I'd finished polishing and figuring it I was driving it to a friend's house in the county, laid carefully in my passenger seat. Some woman in front of me suddenly decided she was about to pass up her turn, slammed on her brakes, and when I was forced to do the same the mirror went slamming into the floorboard, hitting a hunk of steel and putting a couple big chips (the size of a thumb) in the surface.
Anyway, if I grind another mirror I want to go significantly bigger than my 13.1 inch scope, which means I'll have to make a grinding machine. That project is obviously going to be way down on the list behind all the other projects.
BTW, the 13.1" is an old Coulter Optical Odyessey One that my dad saw advertised in the local paper, not three weeks after I finished building my 8 inch. The seller had spent half a year on a waiting list, then found out it was too big to get in and out of his house. So he sold it for what he paid (about $400 in 1983), even though he'd added a Telrad finder. I modified it for 2-inch eyepieces, but otherwise haven't done much with it.
Oh, and I just noticed that Orion is selling a 50-inch Dobson for $123,000. I wonder what the story behind that is?
They wont be selling many of them. If any of them at all, not at that price.
Yeah, likely not, but then again I do know some people who wouldn't hesitate, but definitely too pricey. But when it comes to that big, it's more fun building it yourself. When my Dad built his trailer mounted 21", he could fit inside the tube. I'd have nights camping up in it
Speaking of which, here's a picture showing what I mean:
Which galaxy do you want to view? The Pegasus galaxy is filled with Wraith (blech), another is an Ori wasteland, and the distant one that SGU's Destiny just left is going to look very small.
Anyway, my 13.1-inch scope got dropped off at work this morning, covered in dust and spider webs. I've cleaned it up but the mirror coating is definitely on its last legs. I also need to fix the Telerad finder, maybe add a riflescope for a back-up finder, add a balancing mechanism and an eye-piece tray, and come up with a better set of wheels for rolling it around.
Oh, and the 2-inch coma corrector is also a TeleVue.
Anyway, my 13.1-inch scope got dropped off at work this morning, covered in dust and spider webs. I've cleaned it up but the mirror coating is definitely on its last legs. I also need to fix the Telerad finder, maybe add a riflescope for a back-up finder, add a balancing mechanism and an eye-piece tray, and come up with a better set of wheels for rolling it around.
Oh, and the 2-inch coma corrector is also a TeleVue.
Out of interest to anyone reading this thread, Sky Publishing has just released a complete digital library of every Sky & Telescope magazine they've published since the first issue. from 1941 to 2009. It's a set of 8 DVDs with a searchable index. My Dad just got his today.
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The price of telescopes has dropped quickly over the last ten years. for your situation upgrading from a small scope, I would recommend a 8 inch F6 Dobsonian, a good blend of aperture and F ratio for both planetary observations and for some deep sky objects. There is really no need to go higher in aperture than this, a faint galaxy will still appear as a faint galaxy as you ramp up the aperture.
The beauty also is it is easy to dismantle and move around unlike an equitorial mount which is usually bogged down with heavy weights. The tube length is ideal to fit in the boot of a car if you decide to head off to a real dark sky.
The beauty also is it is easy to dismantle and move around unlike an equitorial mount which is usually bogged down with heavy weights. The tube length is ideal to fit in the boot of a car if you decide to head off to a real dark sky.
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