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[Dogwatch]

Hello, I am new here.

I recently got into star gazing. I purchased a telescope, celestron 50tt powerseeker. 

It has been good not great.  I have really fallen in love with Saturn, watching it go across my telescope and seeing the rings is amazing. 

 So then I purchased a bigger telescope (10inch mead Newtonian reflector)  to get better sight picture but they look the exact same. What am I missing? Same eyepiece size. Same location and weather conditions. The new telescope has the ability to zoom in ( is that the right terminology?) but it just blows stuff up into a big fuzzy ball of light. How can I make it not blurry? 

 

 

 

[Nigella Bryant]

Might seem a funny answer but have you refocused? 

[Kn4fty]

A larger scope can increase the possible magnification level. It all depends on focal length and aperture. But it also is more prone to atmospheric disturbances. The turbulance in the upper atmosphere can greatly limit a large scopes level of mag. Just wait till you have the scope out in calm skies. It'll blow you away in what you can see.

Rob

[Stu]

Plenty of factors at play here @Dogwatch. 

The atmosphere is one of the biggest players in terms of how good your view is. Not sure where you are, but from the UK currently the planets are low, so you are looking through hundreds of miles of turbulent air. Observing when the planets are at their highest is all you can do here, which is when they transit the meridian each night (due South).

The atmosphere itself varies quite alot, sometimes still and sometimes very turbulent, so on this front you just have to observe on as many different nights as possible, and for as long as possible each time. A quick look often won't show much, but spend half an hour or more at the eyepiece and you will catch the moments of good seeing and will begin to pull out the detail. One problem with larger scopes is that they tend to be more affected by poor seeing; you have to wait longer for the stiller moments when the views should be good. If it's a bad night though, go and observe something else at lower power.

Moving on to the scope. Two main things to take care of here, cooling and collimation.

Your scope has a big lump of mirror in it which heats up during the day, and has to cool down before it will give the best high power views. Put the scope out an hour or so before you want to observe, somewhere cool and if outside put the tube at about 45 degrees so the heat can escape but passing birds can't take a pot shot at your mirror! Tube currents caused by a warm mirror will spoil your view, so make sure it is cooled properly.

Lastly, collimation. This is the process of aligning the primary and secondary mirrors in the scope. If misaligned this will prevent you from getting good high power planetary views. If your scope was bought second hand, or even if it has been transported at all it is likely to need aligning. A simple star test will tell you if it needs doing. Defocusing on a reasonably bright star will show a set of diffraction rings. These should all be concentric and centred on the star. As you bring the star to focus they should all come together in a nice small disk with diffraction spikes. If things look of centred and you can't get to a nicely focused star then you need to collimate. There is plenty of advice on the web about doing this but do ask on the forum again if unclear.

As an observer, you will also improve your observing skills over time. Things you don't pick up now will become obvious as you spend more time observing.

I hope that is of some help.

Stu

[Ignoro]

Maybe you need a new eyepiece, which ones do you own now? There should be quite a bit of a difference between the two scopes...

[Ricochet]

8 hours ago, Dogwatch said:

The new telescope has the ability to zoom in ( is that the right terminology?) but it just blows stuff up into a big fuzzy ball of light. How can I make it not blurry? 

No telescope has the ability to zoom, if you are thinking that turning the focuser knobs will zoom in on the object. All the focuser is for is focusing. You need to turn the focuser so that the image of the planet becomes smaller. When the image is at its smallest and sharpest it is in focus. Anything else is out of focus, not "zoomed in".

 

8 hours ago, Dogwatch said:

 So then I purchased a bigger telescope (10inch mead Newtonian reflector)  to get better sight picture but they look the exact same. What am I missing? Same eyepiece size. Same location and weather conditions.

This makes it sound like you already know how to focus properly, but there is no way that the two telescopes will show the same image when using the same size eyepieces. The 50TT has a 50mm aperture and 375mm focal length while the 10" will have an aperture of 250mm and a focal length of somewhere in the region of 1000-1200 depending on exactly what you've got. With a 10mm eyepiece the 50TT will give you a magnification of 37.5x, but the 10" will give 100-120x, so about 3 times the size. Additionally, the resolution of the 10" will be 5x that of the 50TT so under the right conditions you will be able to see much finer detail. However, as already noted in previous posts the atmosphere can often be the limiting factor. Observing when the planet is at its highest in the sky, and observing over vegetation rather than man made structures will help to limit these effects.

[Carbon Brush]

Hello Dogwatch. Welcome to SGL. The best astro forum - well I think so anyway.

Excellent advice from all of the above posts. I would only add that if you tell us exactly what scope & eypieices you have, then we can do the sums quickly on image size/magnification and give you better pointers.

David.