Starwatcher2001

Hi Maho, and welcome aboard.

Are you likely to be doing your observing from home, or might you be seeking dark skies sometimes?

I'm "old school" and would normally recommend learning to star-hop first rather than using goto, but in a light polluted environment that can be frustrating. 

You'll still learn the sky and can learn to star-hop with a motorised scope, but it is slightly easier with tracking.  It's often the case that by the time you've consulted the charts, remembered that the orientation is different through the eyepiece, and have worked out which star is next on your little journey... the star you were on has drifted out of the view!

Hiya and a warm welcome aboard.

This is a wonderful hobby and quite addictive.  As you are already in the countryside and have dark skies, perhaps portability (as in putting it in the car to take it elsewhere), might not be a major factor. You will of course need to take it outside and bringing it back in.

I too would recommend a "Dobsonion", as it's a simple design and much of what you'll be paying will be spent on the optics. As you may know, telescopes are not so much about magnification as collecting light. Collecting more of those photons means a brighter and more detailed image, so in simple terms the bigger the mirror (assuming you chose a reflecting telescope), the better.  Light is of course collected across the AREA of the mirror, and you'd get 78% more the light collected by an 8 inch mirror than a 6 inch - which isn't always intuitive.  The mirror is one thing that you can't really upgrade without getting a new tube, or entire telescope. Better eyepieces and other goodies can be bought as you all progress in your hobby.

Learning the night sky and "star-hopping" to find cool objects to look at is great fun, especially as there'll be three of you doing this together.  You can start doing this before you get your scope, just get yourself a good sky guide. I started with "Night Sky" by Collins, which shows the necessary constellations, and which ones are "up" in the sky during the month.  Learning a bit of the mythology is quite fun too, especially with kids. I always think of "Auriga the charioteer", "Perseus the hero", and "Bootes the herdsman", whenever I look up.

Don't be disappointed when the image in your scope doesn't look like those glossy photographs in the books. They were probably taken with long exposure photography and the view through the eyepiece is never as good. However, there are a lot of beautiful objects that can really be appreciated. My wife's favourite is a "double" star called Albireo, which has a beautiful golden star and a blue star orbiting each other. Star clusters and globulars can look amazing, as can planetary nebulas (look like donuts).  With say an 8" and dark skies, you'll likely be able to see many galaxies, and even make out some of the structure of them.  Observing is a learned skill, and you'll find you'll see more detail and be able to find fainter objects the more experience you get. You'll never forget the first time you see Saturns rings or the moons around Jupiter.  Observing the craters on the moon is also an experience you'll probably never tire of, and one of the few objects you can look at during the day!

If you already have any binoculars, bring them outside too. Looking up at the Milky Way through almost any bins can be quite an experience, and they can be very helpful when looking for things.

All the best,

Mark.

Sorry for replying to an old thread, but I'll add this is case it's useful to someone.  I've been away from ATM for a long time, so forgive me if this is common knowledge.

When motorising my dob, I found that adding a weight to the tail end of the stepper, like a flywheel, helped increase slewing speed significantly. It does require that you have the ability to ramp the slew rate up from an initial slow rate to a faster one over a period of a few seconds, and then ramp down at the end. This helps overcome the tendency to stall the motor. The compromise is the bigger the flywheel, the faster the eventual slew, but the more likely it is to stall. In my case I experimented with circular lead weights to find a good value.

My home built 8.75" dob spent 18 years untouched in the garage with a cover over the top of the tube, and it didn't fare well. The primary mirror is tarnished and pock-marked. It's still usable, but would take more than re-silvering to restore it. It also looked like there was a spiders reunion in there at some point.

Not bad at all. There's some nice looking detail around the terminator. Looking forward to seeing some more, once the moon stops hiding in front of the sun.

Hi Sam, I spent years with a similar sized telescope and saw tons of objects. You're gonna have a blast. I'm approaching 60, so having a scope you can haul around is the way to go.

Get your wife involved? Mine enjoys seeing the show pieces like the planets and moon. She also made me an elasticated "hat" for the top of the tube, which keeps out the dust. A shower cap if it will stretch that far will also work.

Welcome aboard, this is a great hobby.

Mark

Welcome aboard Lou. Love the shot of the launch.

Greetings from Teesside.

I've been learning a lot from reading the posts here for a couple of weeks, so the polite thing would be to say thank you and introduce myself. I'm new here, but not to astronomy.

I first got involved in the late nineties when I looked up one cold October night and realised I wanted to know more about the universe. I knew one specific cluster of stars went by the name of the "little plow", but even that was wrong. I'd been looking for years at The Pleiades!  A week later, armed with "The Night Sky" by Collins, I went out each clear night to look up in wonder.

I'd try to learn a different constellation each night, and try to recognise previous ones without looking them up. It's not that difficult to quickly be able to navigate around, and that's when the enjoyment kicks in. Seeing me get up early in the morning to look at the sky, my wife commented that I was obsessed. She was right, but I'd still argue it's a good obsession.

Everyone knows that the constellations change across the seasons, but seeing them move week to week and understanding why is much more interesting. Discovering that Venus was both the evening star and morning star blew me away, and lead me to learn about the planets, the ecliptic, the Earths axis etc. That's the fascinating thing with this hobby, there's always more to learn. As the months rolled by I decided that summer sucks, and found myself yearning for cold, clear winter evenings. Eventually I was welcoming back Orion, Auriga and the Pleiades like old friends. November and December always bring those early feelings of wonder back.

After a year of just learning the sky and squinting through an old pair of 10x50 bins I'd picked up for a tenner at a car-boot sale, I decided I needed a telescope. Forgive me friends, I committed the cardinal sin and went out and bought a department store telescope in my ignorance. The Bresser Stellar 11750 was quite impressive with it's massive 70mm objective and those wonderful plastic 0.965 eyepieces. But knowing no better, I stiffened up the tripod and added some threaded rod to stop it spinning like a drunk at the slightest touch, and got stuck in. Even with such a modest telescope, I was smitten. Who wouldn't be, laying on a piece of tarp on the ground like a sniper, neck cricked, peering through a tiny eyepiece at Saturn. It didn't look like the coloured pictures on the box, but at least I could see its "ears". I stuck with it for a year, and using the splendid book "Astronomy with a Small Telescope" made around 50 observations, mainly the planets, moons, star clusters and the wider doubles.

In early 1999 I discovered CDAS (Cleveland and Darlington Astronomic Society) and started going to the meetings and observation evenings. The guys there were brilliant, letting me observe far more objects through their proper scopes, and helping me improve my star-hopping. I made some really good friends there, and really recommend newcomers visit or join an observing group. I also decided I needed a bigger scope.

With a family and mortgage we didn't have a lot of free cash, so I decided to home-build a "Dobsonion". I purchased an 8.75 inch mirror (f/7.3), a diagonal, a focuser and a 26mm Galileo Plossl for the princely sum of £270. During the summer and early winter I spent every weekend and evening in the shed cutting, sanding and painting plywood, making spiders out of hacksaw blades and learning about telescope optics. I also spent a bit of time swearing and revamping where the hole for the focuser should go. Over the years my scope would undergo a number of painful transformations (There's a couple of pictures below, including an initial disasterous attempt at an EQ mount) . She saw first light on 09/09/1999. I saw the transit shadow of Europa across Jupiter, split gamma Andromeda, and think I saw some galaxies using averted imagination (we don't have dark skies around here). But I was one happy guy - it worked!

For the next couple of years, my scope and a few more eyepieces satisfied me. I'd spend every clear evening outside, and often set my scope up on the front drive and grab passing people to look at the moon and planets. The vast majority appreciated it, and it never ceased to impress the kids, which I always hoped would catch the astronomy bug. But there was two problems: no tracking, and eager kids have a habit of bumping scopes out of position. I needed a driven scope.

Cash was still tight and what I wanted was well out of my price range, so decided to do more DIY. I came across a group of ATMers (Amateur Telescope Makers), who had a wizard method of creating a computerised scope using stepper motors, an old laptop and some custom electronics. One prominent member was Mel Bartels, who'd written some superb software to drive it all. Being a computer techie, this was right up my street (and relatively inexpensive). I spent the next 18 months revamping the mount, adding threaded plastic rod around the bottom and part of the alt circles, stepper motors reclaimed from a couple of 8" diskette drives, and learning about the intricasies of trying to do precision tracking on an alt-az mount. Mel kindly gave the software, his designs, and a lot of help, entirely free of charge and I'll be forever in his, and the other ATMer's debt. His software was amazing, converting ra/dec to alt/az, stepping and microstepping the motors to give speed control, correcting (to a certain extent) for inaccuracy in the geometry of the scope and unlevelness, periodic error correcting, ramping up/down the slewing... amazing stuff.

When I'd finally finished, I had a computerised scope that tracked fairly well (for visual) and did goto after a fashion. One of the happiest nights of my life was wandering around the Virgo cluster for hours one stunningly clear March night. But the price was having to carry a much heavier scope, a laptop, two car batteries, miles of wires and connectors, and spending half the evening babysitting the thing. When it worked, it was superb, but I did lose a lot of observing time setting up, calibrating and tinkering with it, and got a somewhat frustrated. (The problems were due to my work, not any shortcomings in Mel's system).

After a few months I lost heart carting it around, stripped it back to a basic Dob and reverted to star-hopping. Shortly after that we had some family stuff happen, work went manic and I had to put astronomy on the back-burner, where it languished for far too long. My poor old dob didn't fare too well in a shed for nearly two decades.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago. The kids are now grown up, the mortgage paid, and I have an excuse (my 60th) to treat myself. I've bought a good second-hand Celestron 925 evolution, some toys to go with it and I'm raring to get cracking with visual astronomy again. It's been a long time and I've really missed it. The 925 had her first light last week. All my favourite celestial objects have been faithfully waiting for me, so it's time to revisit them and discover lots of new ones. This time the emphasis will be on observing more, and building less (as much as I enjoyed the learning experience).

For the first time in years, I'm really excited about astronomy again, and it feels good!

Thanks to everyone who has posted here over the years, I've already learned a tremendous amount from you all. Hopefully that will continue and I'll be able to contribute back in some way.

All the best. Mark

PS: Car-boot sale binoculars can be made into cracking finders with a piece of pipe and some duct tape!

Make sure your location, date/time and Daylight Saving Time are entered correctly. Sorry if it's obvious. I got caught out last week as my new Celestron expects the date in US format MM/DD/YY.

Hi Dave,

Welcome aboard. I'm new to this forum, but not to astronomy (must post my own introduction...)

I remember the excitement of discovering the night sky maybe twenty years ago, and again a few weeks ago after around a decade away from observing. It's addictive and friends and family tend to think of you as "a bit odd".

I just live down the road from you in rainy Thornaby, so if you need local help with anything, feel free to get in touch.

Mark

Ancient thead, but still useful to anyone considering the 9.25 ... like me. Much appreciated.