ANOTHER HOBBY AND STEEP LEARNING CURVE

No mans allowed in my shed breathing on my seeds Nah
x

 

We are past the watershed aren't we?

 

What a wonderful bit of kit Armandii! My school chaplain had one the same and also had a camera attachment and took some amazing astro-photos.
Here's wishing you dark skies

 

Depends on the time you are reading it - *this* moment, I can say "yes". Now, if I read it tomorrow coffee break ... ... ....

 

Cracking piece of kit Our Mandy

When I first got into Astronomy I found www.cloudynights.com forum very helpful.

I expect you will use the GoTo, but if you want to point the scope manually I found a Red Dot pointer much easier than the finder scope. The one I had is called Telrad
http://www.firstlightoptics.com/finders/telrad-finder-astronomy.html
It enables you to offset from a known star by 5-degrees (or whatever) and then when you look through the scope Bingo! the thing you want is slap bang in the middle. Before I had that I did a search-plane zig-zag pattern across the sky trying to stumble onto the object

You will easily see Jupiter's moons (they instinctively look different to stars), and depending on the power of your scope (and how dark the skies are, and how good the "seeing" on the night) you may be able to see Jupiter's red spot. If you can't, and have the patience, you can keep observing it and there will be moments of better "seeing" where you will get more of the picture.

The first time viewing Saturn's rings through an amateur 'scope is a memorable occasion. Its (currently) a bit low in the sky though

Still time to have a look at Orion's nebula - before it disappears over the horizon for the Summer.

Other sights I like are the Cluster in Hercules and a bit later in the year (Summer onwards) the Andromeda galaxy - once you have learnt where it is, and given a reasonably dark sky, you should be able to just about make it out with the naked eye; its just a faint-fuzzy blob in the scope, but it blows me away that the light you see has taken more than 2 million years to get here also how wide it is - if you get a good, wide angle, eyepiece you can compare the angular width of it with something like the Seven Sisters - they are about the same width except that the Seven Sisters is a few hundred light years away, and my brain struggles to comprehend carrying on that angular width for a further 2 million light years and trying to figure out how wide that thing actually is

You'll be able to see Venus's crescent, and the Moon is an interesting target of course - look at the terminator (the divide between light and dark) as that's where you will see the most contrast, which enables you to make out hills and valleys.

You'll probably need a bit of a budget for some eyepieces, particularly if the scope can take a 2" eyepiece? I have a TeleVue Panoptic 41mm - that has a 68° Apparent Field of View
http://www.televue.com/engine/TV3b_page.asp?id=22&Tab=EP_EPO-41.0
and if you can afford a Nagler that's an 82° Apparent Field of View - its like being in a planetarium!
http://www.televue.com/engine/TV3b_page.asp?id=21&Tab=EP_EN5-31.0

 

I was going to say something similar but thought Noooo and look who did

 

Kristens answered this above... so you will be able to see other galaxies , the distance to even our nearest Andromeda is incredible . Will you be able to see a spiral galaxy ?

 

presumably your GoTo gadget will "track" as well? (If not astro-photography is not going to be very practicable).

Suggest you look into getting a Webcam type attachment, rather than using your camera (with adapter). Although I know little about it, so don't go primaryily by my advice!

The idea with web-cam-route is that it takes gazillions of frames, the quality doesn't need to be outstanding, and you then use some "stacking" software that stacks the frames, on top of each other so to speak, aligns the bright objects (so I assume sorts them out if the tracking is a little-bit-off, and for the duration of the exposure selects frames with greater clarity [e.g. where atmospheric disturbance, for that moment, was minimal; or no clouds passing over! and no aeroplane con-trails ] and you wind up with WAY more detail than you can see through the eyepiece with Mark #1 Eyeball.

Its not for me though ... what I can't see through the eyepiece I'm happy to look at a Hubble picture of ...

I have a selection of Meade eyepieces, they are reasonably quality and not bank-breaking. I have 20mm, 11mm, 6.7mm. Depends on your focal length, of course, but 6.7mm is my max magnification (200x springs to mind, but it might be 400x, I can't be bothered to look up / do the calcs, sorry!) and I use it very rarely. Its only any use for Moon / planets. My Televue Panoptic is actually 35mm (now that I have checked!) and is a really generous wide-sky gazing lens, but the Televue Nagler would be nicer

I got all my kit from Telescope House. Dunno if they have good prices now, but I would have researched it at the time and they would have been best-bang-for-buck when I bought it- but that's more than 10 years ago when is started

If you are going to use GoTo, rather than push-to navigation (which does help you learn where things are in relation to other things) then no point getting the TelRad. I enjoyed learning how to navigate my way around the sky, and I did subsequently buy a GoTo navigator computer thingie (I have a Dobsonian scope - so no motorised GoTo - Dobsonian is just a 3-ply rotating base which is rock stable, but you have to push/tilt the scope to point it at any object, the idea is that the money saved on a really stable tripod mount can be spent on a BIGGER scope [its got a 12" primary ] ) and it is quite fun to know what the key objects in the sky are - so you can Talk Down to ordinary mortals - but I'm a bit of a geek at heart, as you know

So my need to learn to navigate the sky would have been different to yours. You might want to do that as a secondary project? whereas for me it was a must-do first step!

If you are shopping your might like to have a green laser pen-thingie. If you have friends round and are looking at things in the sky its a million times easier than pointing with your finger and expecting your friend to be able to figure out WHAT you are pointing at

Put the scope out for 30 mins to an hour before you observe - to allow the optics to cool to ambient. In the winter it may be a race before they get condensation on them (solution to that is a heater - but that distorts the viewing - you might restrict your viewing to an hour or so come winter time )

You could get a red torch (so you don't disturb your night vision when outside viewing, or if you need to come back into the house to get something). I bought one initially, but I never really used it - there was always enough ambient light that, once I had acquired night vision, I would find my way back to the house. I then closed by viewing-eye tightly, turned the house light on, used my other-eye, and found what I needed. Weird feeling when you go back outside with one eye in Night Vision mode and the other not!

South aspect is the best direction to view most-of-the-time.

 

Can your scope take a 2" eyepiece? If so I would seriously consider that for the 32mm - and get a posh one. I got a cheap 2" one originally and the F.o.V. was nothing like the Panoptic, and I've not really used it much so although it was OK, and cheap , it wasn't money well spent. I can't speak for the higher magnification lenses, as I've never had the opportunity to look through a high-end, wide FoV, high magnification lens, but for the low magnification ones the wide FoV that I have is like night and day to the cheaper, narrow FoV, one that I bought.

Local astronomy club might give you the chance to compare viewing with ordinary / expensive lenses? Dunno if you can locate a local enthusiast with some decent kit - does a site like CloudyNights have a facility like that I wonder? - but I think seeing someone else's before spending your money might help you decide if you can actually see any difference between medium and expensive lenses. Bit like HiFi - I struggle to tell the difference between Decent and Really Expensive, so have never bothered to spend more than "decent" on sound quality

 

P.S. I don't think that Zoom eyepieces have much merit, although I have been tempted by very high magnification zoom lenses. Changing lenses at high magnification, and trying to keep the object in view etc. is much more tricky than lower magnification, and "seeing" is rarely good enough to support high magnification, so I think it may be worth trading off lens quality for the convenience of zooming in-and-out.

But I've only ever considered the Nagler zoom ... and never found a second hand one at a price that I can afford!

http://www.company7.com/library/televue/orrtv3_6zoom.html

I couldn't find a comparison photo of a TeleVue Nagler (or Ethos) eyepiece against something more ordinary, such as a Plossl eyepiece, but this article perhaps best sums up what I am trying to describe as being the benefit:

http://www.televue.com/engine/TV3b_page.asp?id=114&plain=TRUE#.UzTBOqh_vAk

but best if you can find someone who has some Nagler or Ethos eyepieces and have a look through their scope.