DamianL

Thanks. Whilst I’ve always been passionate about space and our solar system in particular, I’m a complete novice when it comes to observing through powerful equipment like this. My only telescope prior was a cheap little Discovery Channel branded one from the Argos catalog when I was a kid. Over Christmas I registered with our local astronomy club who have a dark site about 20 minutes from me with pads and an observatory. Between those guys, my growing library, and this forum I’m looking forward to a very educational year!

I had it outside all afternoon. I spent some time with light to make sure the finder scope was aligned and also did some rudimentary focus testing on distant objects. I haven’t collimated it yet, but general focus seems OK and I’ve been a little scared of touching it, not least because the clear skies have been few and far between and I wouldn’t want to spend my entire day fixing what I’ve broken! I do have some holiday this week so I plan to have a go at proper collimation then. Hopefully get the process down so I have no fears doing it before every session. In the mean time I’ve found a video on YouTube here that shows the same thing that I was viewing through my scope, in case my description was a bit rubbish. I don’t know how to do timestamps in YouTube links, but 6 minutes in shows it pretty well. Ignore the fact that the channel is a little bit OTT aliens and fairies. My collimator is a Cheshire, so no laser for me.

This is my first post having had my telescope for around 6 months which was swiftly accompanied by endless cloudy skies. I managed to get out for the first time this week and was checking out some of the brighter, bigger stars in the sky including Betelgeuse and Sirius, and when looking through my telescope once focussed I could see what looked like solar activity, it actually looked like a large dot of fire with shimmering ripples. Surely there is no way that a home telescope (8” Dob) would be viewing distant stars with that level of detail, so my question is what am I actually seeing and is it an indicator of something I need to tweak in my telescope perhaps with collimation or something?