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  • Any astronomy fans in? – telescope recommendation please
  • Bullet
    Full Member

    Thinking of getting a telescope as really enjoy the night sky and would like to see more. Don’t know where to start and don’t want to spend big money but would like to connect a DSLR to it if possible. Any thoughts or recommendations would be much appreciated. This popped out of a quick scan of the internet… http://www.amazon.co.uk/Celestron-31…/dp/B000MLL6RS

    kimbers
    Full Member

    to use an slr youll need a motor to compensate for the earths roataion just make sure that its compatible with one

    alanl
    Free Member

    I used to love looking up and seeing what’s out there. Then I bought a £300 telescope.
    So, clear nights are either very late in the Summer, when I want to go to bed, or during the Winter, when I dont want to get cold.
    Take the scope out, leave it out 10 minutes, so the condensation goes (or freezes on it).
    Then I go out, and start looking around. And getting cold. The realising that a £300 telescope is not the Hubble. In fact it is so disappointing, that you will vow to not bother again. Initial enthusiasm soon wanes. Saturns moons as a spec of light only hold so much fun in them. Nice to see them, but really, it is just a spec of light with a cheap scope. And, by cheap, I mean less than £2000.
    Even at £2k you’ll be disappointed, so you’ll want to go to your local societies or Uni’s scope and use that. They are better. By far. And cheaper.But they still do not compare to the photos of galaxies etc that are published – mainly as the ones published are a montage which would never be viewable by the human eye.

    So, really, I wouldnt bother unless you are loaded, and dont mind wasting money. You will be disappointed.
    If that doesnt put you off, then the first people to call and have a chat with are the great guys at telescopehouse.com. They know pretty much all there is to know about scopes.

    Or, far easier is to download Stellarium, buy a few books of Hubble pics, and increase your knowledge of Space, in the comfort and warmth of your house.

    HTH
    Alan.

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    Bullet
    Full Member

    Cheers Alan – have to say you make a lot of sense! Think I might spend the money on bike stuff instead 🙂

    igrf
    Free Member

    +1 to what Alan said, the girls bought me one for my birthday so i could use it myself and show them stuff, always having had an interest dating back to boy scout astronomy badge, but they are very disappointing and once you’v done the moon, mars etc everything Alan says is true, plus light polution these days is so much worse than when I was younger.

    ahwiles
    Free Member

    you can get a crappy 4″ reflector for about £70, maybe less on ebay.

    you’ll have all the fun that Alan describes, and you’ll have loads of problems that make you impressed by the observations made in the early days of astronomy.

    i’ve seen the moons of jupiter, and all that sort of stuff, go whizzing by my field of view (Cheap telescopes are tricky to aim, and the cheap tripods will be very wobbly, it takes ages to line up with what you want to see, and for the telescope to stop wobbling, and by then your target has moved out of your field of view. You have to learn how to point the scope at the patch of sky where you want to be looking in a minute or so)

    good fun for a few times, you’ll know by then if you want to take it further.

    Trimix
    Free Member

    Check out this Forum, its the STW of Astronomy: http://stargazerslounge.com/

    Ive got a 350mm Dobsonian.
    Its motorised so it will track stars and planets.
    Basically I can see the rings of Saturn clearly.

    It cost several grand though.

    Check this website out for what you will really see with the scope you plan to buy: http://www.12dstring.me.uk/fov.htm

    martymac
    Full Member

    to add a bit of balance, the same telescope can be bought for just over £150 WITH the motor drive, which will remove many of the problems described above.
    http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/celestron-astromaster-130eq-md-reflector-telescope-with-motor-drive-03506621-pdt.html

    Duane…
    Free Member

    My Dad is working on a new telescope at the moment. Not sure if it will fit in your living room though..

    http://www.eso.org/public/teles-instr/e-elt.html

    Trimix
    Free Member

    Flipping heck, thats big.

    Can you blag us a look through it when its finished. Mountain biking where they build it should be good to.

    dazh
    Full Member

    I was in the same position a few months back. In the end I decided not to bother as I live in Manchester and the light pollution is just too much and it’s too much hassle to drive out into the sticks where the dark skies are. I’d say if you’re patient and have a geeky interest in the technical side of it, and live in a place where you can get dark skies from your back garden, then go for it. A mate of mine has gone from being a complete beginner to getting some decent images of things like the ring nebula with a setup which cost less than a grand. But as Alan says, don’t expect to just point the scope at something and see something amazing or get images like you see on the web or magazines.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    I’ve thought about this. It is possible to see cool stuff all over the place with small cheap kit – Orion’s belt looks great even with a small refractor for instance.

    The problem is, what are you gonna do? All you can do is point your telescope at it and go ‘ooh nice’. That’s only going to hold a thrill for so long I reckon.

    You can either a) throw money at gear to get pics you could download off the net or b) spend time getting to places with low light pollution to get better images.

    I’d love to take a telescope to the Alps for instance and climb up to 3000m, set it up and take some pics. But really, what’s the point?

    snipswhispers
    Free Member

    i dont own one, so any thoughts on using one of those camcorders with the 60x optical zooms and image stabilisation for amateur astronomy?

    i figured that on a half-decent tripod it would be as good as a cheap telescope.

    IdleJon
    Full Member

    Some typical STW lemon sucking reactions on here! 🙄

    Why bother when Saturn’s moons are just specs of light? I can see the Cassini Division on a clear night from my light polluted city centre location with my £289 200mm dob. Similarly I’ve watched Jupiter’s moons transit in front of the planet, seen the GRS clearly many times, seen Uranus, Vesta, Mars’ polar icecaps, the Whirlpool Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and much more.

    There’s a lot of stuff up there!

    Sure you’ll get better equipment the more you spend, and better detail from a darker location but that’s no reason to say “But really, what’s the point? ” This is the same as telling a newbie not to bother with a MTB as they’ll never ride like Steve Peat.

    @Bullet. My first scope was a 76mm Astromaster – exactly the same as that link but with a smaller aperture. Bought for £70, I sold it to a friend after 2 or 3 months. I’d seen Jupiter and a few DSOs from it and it gave me a taste for a bigger scope. My friend is now doing the same and keeps posting ‘wow…I’ve just seen…’ on Facebook. This is a sensible 40ish man, not a child. The problems with the scope are a flimsy tripod, a TERRIBLE red dot finder, and poor eyepieces. It’s cheap but spend just a little more and you’ll get a much better scope.

    I’d suggest browsing http://www.firstlightoptics.co.uk

    I’d also +1 stargazerslounge – very helpful and a lot more chilled than this place – and Stellarium.

    If you enjoy doing things then buy a scope. Yes, a lot of DSOs are just fuzzy blobs but spend a little time training your eye – something several of the posters above don’t seem to have bothered with – and you’ll see a lot more. Like any hobby, the more time and effort you put into astronomy, the more you’ll enjoy it.

    And really what’s the point in riding a bike when you can put a MTB video on and sit in the warmth of your house….

    Trimix
    Free Member

    Check the forum: http://stargazerslounge.com/
    and you will get an answer.

    kimbers
    Full Member

    ive got a similar scope to the one you posted, the stand is a bit flimsy

    but i took this from light polluted london the other night

    with just a regular slr

    Jupiter and its moons left to right Europa, Io, Calisto, (Ganymeade is in front of jupiter)

    vinnyeh
    Full Member

    Lighbuckets or similar is the answer. Spend your monet there,then process and print your photos

    Popocatapetl
    Full Member

    I’ve got the next model up of the Celestron (bought for my 8 year old daughter last Xmas) with a motor drive. It’s great for the moon and closer planets on a clear night. As idlejon says, get a decent star alighnment sight for it, as even centring on the moon can be difficult otherwise. I would recommend a Telrad reflex sight at £50 ish. Makes it a lot more enjoyable.

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Sure you’ll get better equipment the more you spend, and better detail from a darker location but that’s no reason to say “But really, what’s the point? ” This is the same as telling a newbie not to bother with a MTB as they’ll never ride like Steve Peat

    No, I don’t think so. The whole point of MTBing is the actual activity. It’s not something that can be done for you, and it’s not a mechanical task.

    Finding objects in the sky is a question of looking up the location, pointing at it and going ‘oh yeah there it is’. I mean it’s neat, and everything, which is nice, but to me that’s not enough to make it worth doing. You can’t look at stuff ‘better’ or faster or anything, and if you were able to find it faster there’s no greater innate thrill, unlike mtbing.

    It’s not like you’re looking for anything new or creating anything.

    And really what’s the point in riding a bike when you can put a MTB video on and sit in the warmth of your house

    Because doing something is not the same as watching it. Looking through a telescope is just watching it, and ‘it’ doesn’t do a fat lot apart from move slowly across the sky.

    Now I love science, I love astrophysics and cosmology – but it’s an academic pursuit to me. Seeing a little white dot doesn’t add to it, for me. Knowing what’s out there and how it works is much more fun, imo.

    For example, I’m really tempted to build my own spectroscope and attach it to a telescope. That’s DOING stuff. The fun is in the making and designing.

    IdleJon
    Full Member

    I would recommend a Telrad reflex sight at £50 ish. Makes it a lot more enjoyable.

    Or a Rigel Quikfinder which is a bit smaller – more in keeping with the scope – and about the same price and just as effective. Telrads are pretty big lumps.

    IdleJon
    Full Member

    molgrips, it sounds like we’re coming at this from 2 different directions. I’m quite happy to spend an evening hunting out a planetary nebula just to find it’s a small blur. My scope is manual so it’s not a case of entering coordinates, waiting and then saying ‘oh look I’ve found it.’ I actively need to do some research, get the scope pointing the right way and hunt….

    And that’s often what it feels like – a hunt. (Although to be harsh you could also describe it as trainspotting, but that’s another post maybe..)

    I’ve been looking for the huge, absolutely massively obvious M33 Triangulum Galaxy for over a year but couldn’t find it because of LP. Last week and a dark site I found it and was immensely pleased.

    For me, looking through the telescope is only a small part of astronomy. I think that there is always a degree of researching, thinking about what’s up, what can I see, what do I want to see? I can spend a lot of time just working my way through a star atlas before I even go to my scope.

    I do agree with you on the ‘making’ part but without a telescope there’s not much point. There’s no focus, if you’ll forgive the pun. No point in spending an hour hunting the star charts for DSOs in a particular constellation if I’m just going to open a book or the laptop just to look at pictures.

    As I said, trainspotting!

    exile_smoggy
    Full Member

    There’s quite a nice telescope with a couple of spectrometers for sale here.

    There’s a bit more background info on this blog. I was lucky to be able to use UKIRT and the AAT as part of my PhD before the UK stopped funding them. Tom, the blog author was a Post Doc in the same research group as me at Nottingham Uni and managed to get a job at UKIRT. It seems a real shame that we’re losing facilities like this and not even saving any money.

    It’s something I’d love to get back into as my 6 year old daughter is fascinated by stars and has one of these.

    IdleJon
    Full Member

    exile_smoggy – my daughter has one as well. She likes it, and for £50ish it’s great value.

    exile_smoggy
    Full Member

    IdleJon – I’ve got a solid table we can put it on the garden, probably better than a cheap tripod and she can pop back in the house if she gets too cold.

    It’s the first telescope I’ve actually looked through. All my “proper” observing runs were spectroscopy, so we sat in the control room, entered the ra and dec and started recording data.

    I had a look at the prime focus cage that David Malin used to ride in to take photos. I’m not sure I’d have sat in it while some numpty like me moved the thing about.

    IdleJon
    Full Member

    exile_smoggy – Member

    IdleJon – I’ve got a solid table we can put it on the garden, probably better than a cheap tripod and she can pop back in the house if she gets too cold.

    Same as us – well actually she uses a folding table. She has problems using the finderscope because she wears glasses to correct a squint but we’re working on that..

    Do you still work in astronomy?

    Frankenstein
    Free Member

    I saw Saturn and its rings really well – about the size of 10 pence piece but it was
    after April last year and in mini observatory with a few K spent…

    Home telescopes under £500 are good for moon mapping.

    Binoculars are cheaper and ‘can’ be better than a telescope cost 3 times as much.

    IdleJon
    Full Member

    Frankenstein – Member

    Binoculars are cheaper and ‘can’ be better than a telescope cost 3 times as much

    I’d dispute that because once you’ve bought a decent pair plus a stable mount you are talking about the price of a decent telescope. And you won’t be using hand held binocs for deep space stuff.

    exile_smoggy
    Full Member

    IdleJon – Do you still work in astronomy?

    Sadly not, I’m a typical late 30s, serial STW lurker i.e. an IT Contractor 😥 I had to learn Unix/Linux to do the research.

    Hopefully as Izzy gets older we can become amateurs astronomers together. I know very little about amateur telescopes so always enjoy these threads. On the big telescopes, the operators are a bit reluctant to let postgrads loose without supervision.

    I’ve applied for tickets for Stargazing live in Tatton Park next month, fingers crossed we get them and clear skies.

    OP – sorry for the hijack, but it really winds me up that we’re losing world class facilities like UKIRT and and the JCMT for very little cost saving. Even the AAO has been renamed from Anglo-Australian to Australian Astronomical Observatory. I hope the proposal to run UKIRT as an astronomy community facility finds the funding somehow.

    Bullet
    Full Member

    Maybe I’ll just check out the neighbours wives instead if the stars are so hard to find 🙂 (if they were worth looking at that is)

    Interesting comments all the same, maybe I’ll go for a new wheelset instead!

    Lazgoat
    Free Member

    On October my wife and I were visiting a good friend in Spain and she happened to know an old school friend that worked at an Observatory. So we went up to check it out and it was unbelievable.

    There were numerous highly sophisticated telescopes privately owned and owned by clubs but are all robotic and remote controlled. Their housings opens and clos for each one as they are being used and from what I can tell you can hire them out and use them yourself if you get in touch with the Telescope owners.
    http://astrocamp.es/en

    You can also hire out and use the SLOOH telescope I believe or just sign up for event updates and watch them live from the warmth and comfort of your own home….

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