Planetarian

I'm at about 30 miles from the sea.

I'm just starting observing the night sky with a telescope so I'm just a beginner. I've seen images online of nebulas that look great and full of colour. I'm just wondering if we would actually see them colourful if we looked into our telescope, or people colour them in on purpose. If they do, then what's the point of doing so?

Thanks for the replies, I'm feeling more relaxed about the longevity of my telescope now.

Thanks, that's good news. I'm gonna make sure my mirror stays clean but one day if it will be necessary to give it a wash i guess I'm just gonna need washing up liquid, some sterile cotton balls and distilled water to rinse it.

Update 2: I've got my heritage 130p and I haven't regretted buying it. There's no double image, it's brighter then the other telescope and gives a great image. It was the first time i could see Jupiter's bands, but wasn't too visible, probably because the planet is too close to the horizon nowadays and can't get a great viewing condition.

I've got a SkyWatcher 130p, and just wondering if the primary mirror got any protection on top of the aluminium coating. As I know aluminium gets an oxide later on it's surface after a time. In case they coated it with an extra layer of some kind of protective material, then it will stay shiny for a long time. I hope this is the case.

Update: So I've done a little experiment (still without the laser collimator). I aligned the mirrors using a pinhole cap, and the situation is this: the image is not sharp, I mean everything has a shadow. For example a distant telephone wire looks double, or as it has a shadow very close to it. This happens with any eyepiece. When I cover half of the front opening with a piece of paper, the image becomes crisp and perfectly sharp even with the highest magnification that I can achieve (350x). Of course the image is dimmer due to the paper I covered half the aperture with. Then I removed the paper to open up the whole front again to see if adjusting the primary mirror does anything to the image. It did nothing. The shadow of the objects still remained, no matter how I moved the primary or even the secondary mirror. My conclusion is that the primary mirror must be really bad quality or the secondary mirror is not at the right distance from it. Anyway I decided to return my scope to the seller I bought it from. Now I'm thinking about getting a SkyWatcher Heritage 130p Flextube Parabolic Dobsonian as a starter telescope. I like the portability of it. Or something similar.

That's a nice large dobsonian. Is it stable with those extending bars? Do you also do astrophotography?

Oh I've just found the info under your comments. I'm too new here yet. Anyway I'm still curious at which occasions or for which targets do you use refractor and when to use reflector.

Haha, good answer. I know it's a 'dangerous' question, but if I asked in a separate topic, after a big argument the result would be probably 50 - 50 for each which is useless to me. Just wanted to know your opinions. Or pros and cons. Or what instrument do you have?

Yes, very weird, but anyway, after a proper collimation I'm gonna post an update here. Hopefully with good news. Thanks for the replies so far. Also wanted to ask if it's worth going with reflectors in the future if I decide to invest in a more serious telescope, or might be better off with refractors?

I took out both the primary and secondary mirrors. The primary is in perfect condition. The secondary doesn't seem cracked either although when shining light on it from the side, I can see a very thin half circle half way to the middle of the surface, but this could be a little scratch on the surface only. Otherwise when looking at the mirrored image, can't see any problem. As my laser collimator I ordered, hasn't arrived yet, I tried to do it with a star. I got the concentric circles when defocusing, but one side of the circles were stretched (oval), then I realised that probably the secondary mirror needs to be rotated a little. By the end the stars looked much better, didn't see two of them this time but they were always a little stretched to a certain direction depending on how I moved the secondary mirror. Couldn't test the double image problem on planets as they have gone out of sight by the time I finished messing with the mirror. Anyway I don't have practice yet with alignment using a star so I'm gonna wait for the collimator.

All right, I'm gonna try to remove the mirror later and see from close.

Well, I've inspected the primary mirror and can't see any signs of damage. I'm gonna wait for the laser collimator that I ordered to see if that helps.

No, I was viewing outside.