Where do I start?

[Laurencommins]

Hi, with the help of you lovely lot we went ahead and bought a very well looked after second hand heritage 130p , it's outside in the garden "cooling down" ! My first stop will obviously be the moon, none of the other planets are in view at the moment. 

I wanted to ask some advice on how to find things when they are available to see in the sky! The scope came with a x2 Barlow, the standard 10 and 25 and also a 40 (I think that's what it is) , am I right in thinking we use the 10 to locate objects and the 25 to see it better? At what point does the Barlow lens come in and what exactly does it do? 

Are there any good apps to use? I have "SkyView" which I've been using to try and get my head around how the planets and things move , they don't seem to be visible at night though, how do I find out when they will? 

Im not even sure what I've asked now I just feel like I need help as I don't even know where to start other than pointing the scope at The moon and hoping for the best! :-/ 

thanks

[RayD]

That's great news. 

With regards to the night sky and planet locations etc. There are many good apps or programmes available to help you initially until you really learn the night sky.  One good one is Stellarium, which is free and lets you basically run a clock forward to see what will be available and when. There is also of course good old fashioned sky maps which you can download and print (laminate them as they'll get ruined). 

The eye pieces are the other way round. The smaller the number the higher the magnification. Basically get what you want to see in the middle of your field of view with your highest number eyepiece, then if you want to see it effectively closer, change the eyepiece for a smaller number the refocus. The barlow is just a lens which doubles the effective magnification of a particular eyepiece (40mm becomes 20mm etc. ) 

I'm tapping on my phone so hopefully others will chip in with links or help for you to understand your maximum magnification and field of view, which at this point may not be too important if you are just finding your way around locating stuff. I would say don't be disappointed if you don't see what you expect until you get to grips with this information though. 

Enjoy the clear evening. 

PS. For the pedants the above is simplified purposely and any misuse of terminology is simply to help in understanding. 

[happy-kat]

That's great news.

The heritage is 600mm long so magnification is focal length divided by eyepiece focal length. The 40mm will give 600/40 x15 magnification and the 10mm x60. That 10mm showed Saturn had a separate ring around it.

Stellarium is free and shows for your location what is there now or any date you set.

What you could do is sign up to binocular sky newsletter email as that would give you monthly things to look at.

link to current issue

The book Turn Left at Orion is excellent start to finding stuff it walks you through and I used it to find the ring nebula using your telescope.

[Peco4321]

Hi. If this is your first session take in the moon and start with the 25mm eyepiece you'll be blown away. Just gaze at all the craters then later or tomorrow when it's cloudy, look up the crater names that you saw. 

If it's still clear after 23:00 you're in for a treat as Orion will be rising in the east. Look under the 3 stars in the belt and you will see a fuzzy patch with your eyes. Look through your scope and that is the Orion Nebula. Top left star is Betalgeuse, a bit orange colour. 

Take time to look up what it is that you have looked at and it makes it all seem so much more special. 

If you can see just those tonight, I'd be happy.  Build slowly and get to know the constellations. I've only been properly doing this since April but I wish I'd bought a star atlas earlier than I did in August.  I got this one and it's great:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sky-Telescopes-Pocket-Atlas/dp/1931559317

 

 

[domstar]

All those nights trying to find Jupiter with a 4mm eyepiece instead of my 20mm. What a nightmare. Glad you won't have to do that. Have fun. 

[Laurencommins]

Thank you for your replies, we figured out That my idea of the lenses was back to front and got some amazing views of the moon and all the craters! We had to give up because it went really cloudy so didn't get chance to see anything else !

i installed stellaruim but it seemed very complicated! Il have another go at it tomorrow when I've had chance to let a bit of it sink in! 

Our only issue was that when we put the Barlow lense on , it just seemed to make everything one big blur ! I don't know if we did something wrong or if it's faulty maybe? It came with the scope which we got for £100 so I'm not fussed if we have to buy another. Any ideas? For example we aimed the red dot finder at "vega" and could see it clearly with the 10 and 25 but then put the Barlow on and the whole view was just a blur. ?

Anywho we had great fun and hoping for a cloudless night tomorrow!

[RayD]

14 minutes ago, Laurencommins said:

Thank you for your replies, we figured out That my idea of the lenses was back to front and got some amazing views of the moon and all the craters! We had to give up because it went really cloudy so didn't get chance to see anything else !

i installed stellaruim but it seemed very complicated! Il have another go at it tomorrow when I've had chance to let a bit of it sink in! 

Our only issue was that when we put the Barlow lense on , it just seemed to make everything one big blur ! I don't know if we did something wrong or if it's faulty maybe? It came with the scope which we got for £100 so I'm not fussed if we have to buy another. Any ideas? For example we aimed the red dot finder at "vega" and could see it clearly with the 10 and 25 but then put the Barlow on and the whole view was just a blur. ?

Anywho we had great fun and hoping for a cloudless night tomorrow!

Yes it would be  a blur as you would need to refocus.  You wouldn't need to use the Barlow on the 25 as it almost gives you a 10 anyway, so just pop your 10mm in.

For now I would say with 10, 25 and 40mm eyepieces, just use them to get used to how things work and get used to focusing etc. and then start with your Barlow on the 25mm to see how far you have to wind out the focuser to regain focus.

Glad you enjoyed your views of out Moon  

[Peco4321]

The moons great, I had some good views tonight. Did you make out the crater system called Clavius. Here's a picture from tonight, it's my favourite crater full of craterlets and loads of far better images can be found on this forum. 

Full image as well. 

 

[Dave In Vermont]

I see you've got Stellarium, so I'll not bother with my introduction to same. And as you've found the Moon - I will link you to one of the best "Road-Maps" for our nearest neighbor - the Virtual Moon Atlas, brought to you by SourceForge - the same outfit that brings you Stellarium. SourceForge has many other astronomy-freeware programs as well. Well worth exploring.

So here is Virtual Moon Atlas:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/virtualmoon/

I keep it on my desktop for easy reference.

Enjoy!

Dave

[Putaendo Patrick]

Your Barlow isn't spectacular quality, but you should be able to use it. For example, your 10mm eyepiece used with the Barlow should give magnifications of x120 and you can see some spectacular detail on the Moon. So keep playing with the focuser and you should hopefully get a result.

Technically a Barlow increases the apparent focal length of a telescope by a given factor, and the most common factor is x2. Effectively this doubles the magnification of any eyepiece.

If in the future you decide to upgrade and buy more eyepieces and a better Barlow, it's worth planning the increments. With my telescope, I most often use four favorite general-purpose eyepieces: 25mm, 18mm, 7.5mm and 5.5mm. Using my x2 Barlow, I also get the equivalent of 12.5mm, 9mm, 3.75mm and 2.75mm (the later really is only useful for lunar observation, and then only when conditions are very good).  So for the price of 4 eyepieces and one Barlow I can get a spread of eight different magnifications - a much more attractive economic option than buying 8 individual eyepieces.

Another advantage is that certain designs of eyepiece have very little eye relief at high magnifications. This is especially true of Plossl designs, which can be excellent and very reasonably priced, but at high magnifications need you to have your eyeball very close to the eyepiece glass. You might find, for example, a 5mm Plossl quite uncomfortable, so a very good work round would be to use a more comfortable 10mm Plossl with a x2 Barlow to give the same 5mm.

Persevere with Stellarium! It really is an incredible resource, and even better, it's FREE.

To make things less complicated to start with, you can limit the magnitude of the stars it displays so only the brighter stars are shown. If you press F4 on your computer keyboard, you will get a pop up menu and in the bottom right you can set magnitudes. For reference, magnitude 6.5 is about the limit of what the unaided human eye can discern. The larger the number, the fainter the object. Using you telescope with the 10mm eyepiece in good conditions, you should be able to see objects down to about magnitude 13. There's quite a fun online calculator at http://www.cruxis.com/scope/limitingmagnitude.htm

Another useful Stellarium feature is the sextant symbol in the bottom tool bar. Press this and it will highlight the so-called navigational stars. These are generally bright, easy-to-identify stars used by sailors (and aircraft pilots) for navigation. If you can slowly learn these (all have names), then together with the forms of the Constellations, you will build up an excellent mental map of the night sky. It takes time, but with plenty of observation practice it does begin to come in the end!

Also in Stellarium's bottom tool bar, there's a symbol which looks like a rugby ball with a star in it. This will convert the screen into red, enabling you to use the computer outside beside the telescope and preserve your night vision.

Finally, although there are tons of astronomy resources on the Internet, I would recommend three short videos by David Fuller on Youtube called Stargazing Basics. They are a very simple introduction to finding your way round the sky. This is the first: