Please please help

[Steve81]

Okay so I bought my girlfriend a telescope for Christmas (a gift she has always wanted as a kid) this was my first Christmas gift to her, but you guessed it we’ve seen nothing.......it’s a celestron cometron firstscope 

 

tonight was a massive full moon we were using a 10mm lense (it came with another as well but we lost that drunk at Hogmanay) and saw only bright light, no craters nothing apart from bright light......what are we doing wrong.....please no technical terms as I said we are total total beginners hahaha 

 

thanks steve

[Steve81]

 

[LunarView]

 

With the moon, if it is a very bright moon, you may need a neutral density filter that dims the view a bit, so detail can be seen...

Also focus is critical...

[Steve81]

5 minutes ago, LunarView said:

 

With the moon, if it is a very bright moon, you may need a neutral density filter that dims the view a bit, so detail can be seen...

Also focus is critical...

We had the moon in the view finder and tried put the focus bit up and down 

[Cosmic Geoff]

I was looking at the moon this evening with an 8" SCT and I could not see much detail either.  Full moon is the worst time to view the moon.  Any other time you can see detail on the light/dark boundary as the surface features cast a shadow.

[Steve81]

1 minute ago, Cosmic Geoff said:

I was looking at the moon this evening with an 8" SCT and I could not see much detail either.  Full moon is the worst time to view the moon.  Any other time you can see detail on the light/dark boundary as the surface features cast a shadow.

Thanks for helping I have no idea what a 8” SCT is hahaha 

[johninderby]

As mentioned above viewing the moon when it’s full or near full isn’t the best. Will be much better next week. 

 

[Floater]

There’s nothing wrong with your scope. It’s just the timing that’s bad.

As above, full Moon is not the best time to view. Hang in there and have a look when the Moon is a crescent and trail along the terminator - the line where white turns to black. You’ll be well pleased when you see the shadows showing up craters and mountains. Honest. ?

EDIT: Everybody’s beaten me to it!

[Steve81]

Thanks so much for all your help really is appreciated 

[discardedastro]

So, first things first - can you achieve any sort of focus? Take the scope outside in the day and, *carefully avoiding the sun*, point it at a distant (and I mean reasonably distant) object like the top of a power pylon or tree. You should be able to get the telescope in focus or at least close. If not, you've probably got an issue with alignment of the optics (primary/secondary) or the focal distance of your eyepiece requiring an extension tube. Without knowing more about the scope model, hard to say.

You will probably also note that the finder doesn't actually point that close to where your scope is pointing - this is fine, and why those three little knobs exist around the finderscope, so you can adjust the finder to match the scope view. Doing this in daylight is a great deal easier. It may well be that your finder is sufficiently far off that you're just pointing the scope near the moon and not actually at it - it's easily done with small scopes and narrow fields of view!

[Sunshine]

Good advice above about getting to know the scope with day viewing, and as above also, don’t bother with the full moon, you’re better off shining a flash light in your eyes. 

[reezeh]

What's been said above pretty much sums it up.

Try out the scope on some distant landmark, align your finder scope on that and avoid the full moon.

You'll not really see much that you'll consider worthwhile on the moon when it's lit up head-on. It's a bit like a stone wall that's been given a coat of paint - when the sunlight hits it dead-on it looks "flat" and featureless, but when the light is at an angle there's an incredible amount of detail. Only thing that is of interest when the moon is full are the rays, which are streaks of lighter material thrown out when the craters were formed - most obvious ones radiating from a southern hemishere crater called Tycho. As far as I know, that's one of the ways they date craters as it's (I'm presuming) it's material that hasn't been aged by the sun's radiation as much yet.

 

If you're still wondering "SCT" is "Schmidt Cassegrain Telescope" ?

[Alan64]

The telescope in question is a 76mm f/4 Newtonian.  The design has been around since 1668.  This is how it works...

...the light from an object enters the tube and travels all the way down to the big mirror at the bottom.  Since the surface of the big mirror is curved, the light of the image begins to form a cone once it leaves that surface.  After the light gathered by the big mirror leaves that surface, the light heads back up to the front of the tube, and to the little mirror.  By the time the cone of light reaches the little mirror near the front of the tube, the cone is much narrower.  The little mirror then sends the tip of the cone of light to the eyepiece, and the image formed to the eye and mind of the observer. 

Being that the telescope is an f/4, it will require a more precise collimation, the alignment of the mirrors inside the tube in relation to the focusser, and in order to enjoy sharp and pleasing images.  Don't automatically assume that the telescope was collimated upon its arrival.  Collimation instructions...

http://www.astro-baby.com/astrobaby/help/collimation-guide-newtonian-reflector/

https://garyseronik.com/a-beginners-guide-to-collimation/

In addition, the focal-length of the telescope is awfully short, at 300mm.  If a barlow did not come with the kit, you might want one if you want to see any details of the objects you're looking at; for example...

https://www.365astronomy.com/GSO-2x-Barlow-2-Element-Achromatic-Barlow.html

Without a barlow, that 10mm will give you a power of 30x, and rather low; with the 2x-barlow, 60x, yet still a bit low.  Now, with a 3x-barlow and the 10mm, you'd get a power of 90x.

 

[Ricochet]

If all you saw was bright light over the whole field of view then you could not have been in focus. Turn the focuser so that the circle of light becomes smaller. Once it reaches its smallest size it will be in focus. You should be able to see surface features whether or not it is a full moon. 

As your finderscope is not necessarily aligned with your telescope you should align the finderscope on a distant object in the day first. This will get you in the general area but you will still have to tweak it at night. Move the telescope around a bit when you think that it should be pointing at the moon in case you are actually only seeing some sort of reflection off the walls of your telescope. It will be obvious if the light you were seeing was a reflection and suddenly you see the actual moon.

[Astro-Geek]

I'd second all of the helpful comments already made.

I always try my telescopes initially in daylight (but never towards the Sun), to get used to the focus adjustment and verfy that the "collimation" is reasonably correct.  ( another bit of vital jargon like SCT ! ?)

Your type of telescope, a Newtonian Reflector, relies upon the two mirrors being accurately angled in relation to each other and the eyepiece. That's what the term "Collimation" means.

If you bought it new, then it's probably reasonably well adjusted, enough to give a sharp image anyway.  If it's well out of adjustment, it could give an Un-focusabble image.

So the advice to try it out in daylight is the best way forward.  You should be able to see a nice clear image of whatever it's pointed at, though it will be upside down and may have a blurry dark circle in the middle, don't worry about that, it's quite normal for a Newtonian in bright daylight.