Telescope for family use.

[spidan]

I have around £300 to spend and am after a good scope. Before tonight the descion was easy. I was going to get the sky-watcher 200p dob. However my wife and children are now taking an interest.

How easy, once I have found an object of interest, is it to keep in the eyepiece so the family can also have a look.

I am wondering if I should opt for a scope with tracking to make this easy or stick with aperture.

I want to look at everything lol.

Cheers

[John]

While I find it easy to track objects at high power with my scopes on their undriven, alt-azimuth mounts, on the occasions that my family have looked through the scopes they have got on much better with a driven mount.

You can of course get an 8" dob that will track but you would need for find another £150 in top of your budget. If you want to stick to £300 or thereabouts you will need to take a drop in aperture to 130mm to get the driven mount.

One alternative might be to get a 150mm newtonian on an equatorial mount (eg: the Skywatcher Explorer 150P on the EQ3-2 mount) and see if you can pick up a single axis drive at a low cost.

[Adz]

If you want to look at everything, nothing beats aperture. If you buy eyepieces with a wider field of view, I find that I can show my family and friends these objects more easily. Without having to nudge the thing all the time.

Having objects traverse the field of view is also a very interesting topic of inquiry for the visitors to my scope and why it happens

[Dave Dubya]

I have around £300 to spend and am after a good scope. Before tonight the descion was easy. I was going to get the sky-watcher 200p dob. However my wife and children are now taking an interest.

How easy, once I have found an object of interest, is it to keep in the eyepiece so the family can also have a look.

I am wondering if I should opt for a scope with tracking to make this easy or stick with aperture.

I want to look at everything lol.

Cheers

Go with the Skyliner 200P.

Clear nights are at a premium - do you want to get out there and get observing? Or do you want to spend ten minutes setting up your scope?

[DOBBY]

Hi Spiden... untill last week i would have said go for the tracking...

then the 8yr old from next door came in to 'see stars' within mins. he was able to climb the ladder...refocus to his younger eyes & happily nudge away on the dob..including at higher mags on jupiter

so now...i'd say go for aperture...kids are fast learners... i'm with dave....200p

[spidan]

Thanks for the advice

I think I will stick with the original plan and go for the 200p.

I guess I was just after reassurance they would have no issues even though I would be the primary user 90% of the time.

[Adz]

You will learn to love it as one of your own children

[perrin6]

when showing people an object, I position it so the object is just about to enter the field of view so they still get about a minute's look. This is only necessary at high powers - 200x plus - with lower magnifications the object will stay in the field for long enough.

To calculate how long an object will stay in view; objects move at 15 arc seconds per second so find out the apparent field of view in degrees and multiply by 60 for arc minutes, then by 60 for arc seconds, then divide by 15 to find how many seconds it takes a specific object to cross the view Or use a stopwatch !