Astro master 76 EQ

[Jeannette]

Hi . I have bought a Astro Master 76EQ Telescope which came with two eye pieces. One 10mm , one 20mm. I can see the Moon quite clearly but not any planets. Would I need to get stronger eye pieces . Could you advise please.

[John]

Hi Jeanette - welcome to SGL

Which planets have you tried to observe with it ?.

Venus and Jupiter are quite low in the west early evening at present and Saturn is towards the South at around 10:30 pm, but is not rising too high this year.

[Jeannette]

I have been watching both Venus and Saturn but can only get a bright light, very much the same as I can see in my binoculars. Iv also watched various stars but just bright lights. The Moon when out is very clear but nothing else. I thought maybe I need a stronger lens .

[John]

Your 10mm eyepiece will show you that Saturn has rings and that Venus is a crescent. They won't be very large in the eyepiece (small in fact) but you should clearly see that they are not stars. Stars just appear as pinpoints of light no matter how large the scope or how much you magnify them.

The freeware software Stellarium is very good for finding out where objects are in the sky at a particular time / location so well worth using to make sure that what you are viewing is in fact Venus and Saturn. The former you can't really miss because it's the brightest object in the sky apart from the Sun and the Moon.

A shorter focal length eyepiece can give you a larger image but it's worth practicing getting sharp views at lower powers first and the 10mm eyepiece is good for that.

Maybe you need to adjust the focus of the scope to get a clearer view of these objects ?

[Jeannette]

Thank you so much for advise. Weather permitting I will try tonight. Looking at other peoples pictures they are so clear thought I had it wrong.

[John]

Thank you so much for advise. Weather permitting I will try tonight. Looking at other peoples pictures they are so clear thought I had it wrong.

What we see through a scope generally looks very little like the images that folks are capable of taking through scopes. Our eyes just can't compete with modern CCD's, accumulated frames (1000's of them sometimes) and post capture processing.

[ronin]

Venus will never appear as the remainder of the planets do, Venus is cloud covered and all you observe it the top of the dense cloud layers, in effect you will only see a sort of cotten wool ball, just a very small one.

Saturn I am not sure of how good it will come out in the scope. The 10mm eyepiece would give 70x and I think that may be a little low. It is sort of boarder line and the image produced would need to be good. If you throw in that the 10mm supplied is usually described as poor I half suspect that the image observed may not be as good as expectations.

The problem of any image on the web taht you look at is simply that they are an image and are produced in effect completely different to how the eye operates. Bit misleading to look at an image and expect to observe the same.

Get used to the scope and eyepieces you have. When comfortable perhaps look at a 7mm eyepiece to give 100x.

The catch is that as magnification goes up then in general the image quality goes down.

Thinking about it I suppose the you may have to consider one soon as Saturn is getting lower.

Will say that all the planets remain small, they are not going to fill the eyepiece.

Any Astro Clubs around you?

[IckleImp]

All the objects you are trying to view are fairly low in the sky at the moment, so viewing is not going to be very good for any of us.

[LukeSkywatcher]

Hi Jeannette.

A 76mm scope is on the small side but still very usable.As others have said, most of the planets are difficult to see right now because of their position. I think the 10mm eyepiece you have will be about the most powerful one you will be able to use as it is pushing the scope to upper limit on magnification. Your scope is 700mm long and if you divide this by 10 (the 10mm eyepiece you have), it gives you a magnification of 70x. For a 76mm aperture scope, this is about its limit. To be honest, their are only 9 planets (yep i include Pluto still). There are way more other objects of different kind that you should have a look for: star clusters, Nebula, asterisms. Galaxies may be a bit tough but you should see them are gray smudges of light. 

The Moon should look great with the 10mm eyepiece. Even now as it is, there will be loads to see along the terminator (the line that divides the lit side and the unlit side). The planets will be back on view at some stage (im not sure when) and as small as they will be in your scop, you will know they are planets and not just stars. 

The main thing is to get outside and enjoy yourself. 

[happy-kat]

With the planets being so low right now when observing them you are looking through lots of atmosphere and all the crud in that not helping the view being clear.

Plenty other items to enjoy too, you might still be able to get the bee hive cluster for example.