Newbie with a skywatcher 130p

[Davwilbs]

Sooooo I've been bought the above telecope for my birthday and the the how to use isn't very helpful to someone completely new to watching the night sky.

 

could one of you lovely people give me some advice on the very first steps to take ie aligning my finder scope to eye piece, difference bewteen eye pieces, getting the best possible view of the night sky? 

 

Thanks in advance 

Dave 

[Cornelius Varley]

Hello and welcome to SGL. 
To align the finderscope to the main telescope first choose a target, a tower or aerial etc, somewhere in the distance. Locate this target in the telescope, first using the lower magnification eyepiece (biggest number) and then using the higher magnification eyepiece get the target centred in the eyepiece. Now look through the finderscope and adjust the screws around the finderscope bracket until the the cross hairs are aligned with your target. If your have a red dot finder (RDF) the procedure is similar except the RDF is adjusted using the two adjustment wheels, one the side and one underneath the RDF.

[laudropb]

To work out the magnification an eyepiece gives, divide the focal length of the telescope by the focal length of the eye piece, both in mm. For example if your telescope has a fl of 1000mm a 20 mm eyepiece gives a magnification of 50x. When starting to view an object use your longest eye piece ie lowest magnification first. You can then step up the magnification by changing to a shorter fl eyepiece.