Help i'm a Newbie!!!!!!!!

[snowy1974]

Hi Snowy and welcome to SGL, if you have some dark skies out of Perth, then transport your scope there, to get the best out of your scope for observing or photography, dark skies are essential. To answer your various inquiries, you are best to post in the relevant sub sections of the forum for advice. If your intending to go down the Astrophotography route, then before you start, members will recommend you obtain a copy of "Making Every Photon Count"... http://www.skyatnightimages.co.uk the book most widely used by our forum imagers, enjoy your new scope

many thanks sounds good can't wait till the clouds go as its normally clear here in perth just had a little play the other day but have not had much chance yet as we had clouds past few days

[Charon]

Welcome aboard.

[gnomus]

many thanks for that info most useful. I live in Australia but was from UK so most nights are cloud free and if you get away from street lights the stars are bright most nights. Why is the smaller mm lense so much harder to focus and would buying a 2.3mm be a waste where I live. is having a barlow better than using a higher mag eye piece and if so is X 5 to hard to focus

'Seeing' is not about cloud coverage. It is to do with the nature of the atmosphere. You could have a crystal clear night with no cloud in the sky, but still have poor seeing because of turbulence and particulates in the upper atmosphere.

Your telescope has an upper magnification limit. There are different formulae for this. Please take a look at that website I linked to. I think the most optimistic formula I have seen is a max magnification of 50 x the scope diameter in inches. For your scope, that is 400x. But you will almost certainly never be able to achieve anything worthwhile at that. You will rarely need to go above 200x and most of the time I am using less magnification than this.

It's not really about magnification.

The Barlow alters the focal length of the telescope, but it does not give you more aperture and it does not improve the technical limits of the scope. A Barlow sort of doubles your eyepiece collection. So if I use a 2x Barlow with a 15 mm eyepiece, I get the equivalent of using a 7.5 mm eyepiece. I would forget about the Barlow for now - certainly not a 5x.

Did I mention that it is not really about magnification?

There are many objects that I cannot fit in the field of view of my C8 even with the 40mm eyepiece (approx 50x). The Pleiades is one example, the double cluster another.

[HIP3802]

Hi, snowy, a warm welcome to SGL - and to the worlds of amateur astronomy!

[snowy1974]

With a 2.3 X-Cell you will see a blurred image, that will not remain stationary, it will bounce all over the place.

A 20mm should be OK for Jupiter and a 12mm for Saturn.

Forget a 5x barlow, too "coarse" for the scope, it would be useless with any eyepiece below 30mm and likly little use with a 30mm..

First Clear night outside my house looked at a few star clusters and saw Saturn with 13mm which looked clear enough but its not close enough to see some detail. would a x3 barlow or x5 barlow make it really grainy or is it better to go with a higher mag eye piece 

[Scorpius]

Welcome to the forum Snowy, nice scope you have there. Something to think about if you're planning on doing some astrophotography - a quality wide FOV illuminated reticle eyepiece will probably be the most frequently used ocular in your kit...

[Zadoq]

Welcome to SGL

[Stropper]

Hi and welcome

Looks like you have already got some useful advice but there is lots for newbies I've found if you just take a few minutes to look for it

Good luck and enjoy