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First Use of my Telescope


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Hello all,

Well over the weekend I took my scope up to my girlfriends house in Norfolk and was lucky enough to put it to use. On Friday I thought the weekend was going to be a washout but last night the cloud broke and I saw the moon and Saturn. I was using the mount in a manual capacity and found it very easy. I roughly set my latitude on the altitude scale and used the finder scope to roughly point to the objects. I was amazed at how easy it was and i worked my way up in magnification from the 25mm to the 10mm + x2 barlow. A number of things that I noted:

1) I was surprised how small saturn looked, even when using the 10mm + x2 barlow. Is this normal? I was expecting to see it filling quite a ot of the eyepiece.

2) How quickly the objects moved through the view finder.

3) How bright the moon was. Infact, my eyes were hurting even this morning. I think i might purchase a moon filter.

I live in a flat in the middle of a city with lots of nasty street lights and therefore, when I want to use the scope I'm going to have to travel to a darker sky site. Does anyone have any tips or do's and dont's about transporting the scope and mount?

That's all for now.

Ed

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Hi Ed - yes at 200x magnification Saturn is still quite small - it's further away than you think :

Closest (conjunction) 1,277 million kilometers or 794 million miles

Farthest (opposition) 1,576 million kilometers or 979 million miles

Also you'll find it moves quite quick over the fov at that high a mag - but surely you aren't tracking manually?

The fuller the moon is the brighter it will be in the ep. I prefer viewing it when its less than half - the terminator is allways interesting :eek:

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Hi Brant,

Yes I did figure that it's a very long way away. It's a great site though - seeing the rings for the first time.

Infact i was able to track it manually at the top magnification (10mm with x2 barlow at focal length of 1000mm=200 times). I had it roughly aligned I guess so was able to just release the RA and use that to track.

Ed

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Hey Ed. You have asked alot of questions that I am wanting the answers to as well. I just got mt scope the other week and like you I thought Saturn looked pretty small. Also when the scope was in manual mode Saturn was moving across the eyepiece at a huge rate of knots. Hardly suprising when you think that the Earth moves through space at several thousand miles per hour. I live in Yorkshire and I recently bought the Philips Dark Sky map of the UK. I was amazed at how much light pollution there was out there. If I wanted to go out to a Dark Sky site from where I live I am looking at a 2-3 hour drive to either Kielder forest in Northumberland or Galloway Park in the Scottish borders. In any case I am looking at getting a light pollution filter for now.

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At full moon or close to, the moon is quite painful to view and a lot less interesting than when at a lesser phase. All of the really interesting things tend to be along the terminator, where the shadows bring out peaks.

Without tracking on your scope you will find objects skitter across very quickly, especially on higher magnification. I tend to forget that these days now that I am all powered up. You will spend a lot of time trying to follow things about the sky- you find the object, get focused and it's gone. Find it again, decide to change EP and it's gone. Refocus for the new EP and it's gone...

A lot of people are interested in the idea of the size of the object in the EP. This is less actually important than image quality. As Brantuk says, Saturn is a long way away and so appears quite small. You can make it bigger by ramping up the magnification, but you will generally lose detail doing this, so you need to find a happy medium between the two factors. On planets you will find that at a certain point the image becomes fuzzy, although impressively large, so may want to step down in magnification. On galaxies and nebulae I tend to use my lowest magnification EP as this gives a wide view of the sky and because the targets are so dim and diffuse, high magnifications tend to be less effective.

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I find a good time for viewing the moon is just before the sun sets when there is still a bit of light, even in a blue sky the moon still looks awesome. As brantuk says the terminator is a cool place to look as every evening different things become available. I think saturn is about 10 times firther away from the sun than we are but is still beautiful.

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Hi guys,

Yes, I'm looking forward to viewing the moon when it has some phase to it. The area around the terminator looked very impressive on saturday, although it was very nearly a full moon so will get better.

The reason in was using it manual mode was that I hadn't got a PSU to power the mount. I have subsequently bought one and the 17Ah jump starter unit from Maplin so I'm good to go.

Ed

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Congratulations on getting started in astronomy and seems like you have learnt quite a bit so far. When you read many accounts of what people see and also the fantastic images that are now being produced, the reality that we individually experience can sometimes feel at odds with these earlier expressions of brilliance. It takes a little bit of time both in the setting up and in the acquisition of eyepieces etc for it all to start to unfold and to really get interesting. There are many who get into the subject of doubles stars, others who try to find comets or more distant deep sky objects and various other niches, and it's these other interests that maintain our focus over the longer term and which helps us both increase and encourage our knowledge of the night's sky.

Keep up the good work and long clear skies for your next session.

James

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