Saturn celestron 102 slt

[majestic0110]

Hi all! I hope you are well! I took my new (and first ever!) telescope out last night (Celestron 102 SLT) and managed to stumble across Saturn. Wow! It's SERIOUSLY impressive and I could make out the rings very easily. I ws using a 6mm Celestron Plossl eye piece. Saturn itself though, was very small in my view and appeared very white, i.e. no colouration at all really. Is this what you would expect from my telescope? I am not disappointed but I was kind of expectin a little more.

[Stargazer33]

Hi Majestic,

I got my first scope a couple of months back - a Skywatcher 102 Maksutov/Cassegrain - and Saturn is a little small even with a 6mm eyepiece. BTW my scope has a focal length of 1300mm so dividing 1300 by 6 gives a magnification of 216.66 x. With the 102mm objective this is pushing the optimum maximum magnification of double the objective or 204 x.

The longer you look at the planets - Mars & Jupiter included - the more detail you can see. Such as the cloud belts. The colours are very subtle and nothing like you get in the photographs, especially with our size of OTA.

Getting accurate focus makes all the difference to picking out detail as does letting your tube cool down and getting your night vision. Don't expect to take your scope into the garden from a well lit, warm house and immediately see all possible detail in the planets.

When you do start to see the detail, it is a real WOW moment!

Good luck with your new scope.

Bryan

[majestic0110]

Thanks a lot Bryan,

I am brand new to stargazing, a life long passing interest has suddenly become a keen interest for me now, hence the purchase of the 102! To be honest, when I first saw Saturn - that was a real WOW moment itself so I cannot wait to see some of the messier objects etc. Now, I have to learn how to read sky maps. . . haha. Thanks for the advice, I was actually out in the fields but I live in Dublin, Ireland, and I was not far from the city - the light pollution was very visible with the naked eye. I imagine that wouldn't have helped. Next time I go out will be up the mountains :-)

[Stargazer33]

I live on the South coast in England, near to Brighton so although I have the Channel to the South of me, it is quite light polluted here.

I recently had a birthday so I got a Baader neodymium light pollution filter and a set of standard filters including a neutral density filter. Both of which really help especially in bringing out detail on the Moon.

A dark site will probably be better than the Baader filter. I believe from reading posts on here that different filters do wonders for seeing detail in the planets. So when we finally get some clear evenings here I will be swapping filters around like a mad thing to see what difference it makes!

Take care lugging all your kit up a mountain!

As an after thought, a dew shield would help to block off some of the light pollution and may give you better views when you're not on the top of a mountain. They are really good at keeping the dew off of the object lens too.

They are really easy to make out of an old camping mat or any piece of black plastic, or even card I suppose for a one night use. I made mine from an A3 laminate sheet, passed through the laminator and then lined with black veleveteen material to stop light reflecting down the tube. See my earlier post on Home Made Equipment.

Bryan