anthonyyaghi

On 28/09/2020 at 12:51, AstroMuni said:

Hi,

I have the same scope and the two eyepieces that come with it are not that great. I purchased a Barlow (the Baader 2.25x https://www.firstlightoptics.com/barlow-eyepieces/baader-classic-q-225x-barlow.html) ) and a couple of eyepieces and that improved my viewing. A quick method to slightly improve the quality is remove the erecting prism in your 20mm eyepiece. 🙂

But even with the 10mm one that came with the scope you should be able to see the banding on Jupiter (albeit quite faint). I can see this from my garden in Bortle 6 skies with street lamps etc. If your collimation is off, the image may not be crisp but you should still be able to see the hazy details. Sometimes you have to keep staring at it for quite long before the details leap out, so have patience.

Do the stars show up as dots rather than blobs? If so thats a good start and you can enjoy seeing DSOs while you sort out the eyepieces for observing planets. Suggest looking at the Double cluster in Perseus, Andromeda galaxy and the Globular cluster in Hercules to start with.

Good luck

I got a 6mm eye piece and an x2 Barlow. I will try to check the DSO you mentioned. Thank you :)

35 minutes ago, PeterCPC said:

If the seeing is excellent you could try a 2X Barlow.

Peter

Would it be better to get a like a 4mm or 6mm eye piece or an x2 barlow ?

Hi everyone, this is my first post here but I have been reading a lot of post before deciding to create an account and post my question. I just bought a Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ, and used it yesterday for the first time. However I am not sure if my experience was right or if I was doing something wrong. Here is a few notes of what I did/had:

1. I went to the mountains and was about 1800m above sea level, the sky seemed clear and I was able to see a lot of starts with my naked eye.

2. I only had the 20mm and 10mm eye pieces that comes with the telescope.

3. I aligned my laser finder beforehand and was pretty happy with the results as I was able to point and see any object I want.

4. I left the telescope out for around an hour to bring it to the outside temperature.

5. First I looked and the moon and brought it into focus and the image was very clear and sharp. I was able to easily see the craters with both eye pieces and with a lot of details.

Here is my issue, after watching the moon I decide to try something more challenging, so I pointed the telescope at Jupiter since it was also very close to the moon. I looked up a lot of images online and had my expectation tuned given the telescope and eye pieces, I knew it was going to be small. But my problem is that it just looked like a star, a shining white dot. I am sure it was Jupiter since I was able to see 3 of its satellites and they were at the same position that the Star Walk app showed me. Was I doing something wrong ? Can't I get better results with these equipment and at least see some kind of colors/details on Jupiter atmosphere ? I saw a similar post in here and the main advice was to collimate the score but I don't think this is the issue because I feel like the moon looked sharp enough. I was also able to find Saturn, the rings where barely visible, the separation between the planet and the ring is blurred.

If this is the best I can get with the current setup, then what do you suggest I change or add to get a better viewing experience.

Thank you in advance, and I hope to give back to this community when I get better 😛