Newbie question

[Markyttt]

37 minutes ago, AstroMuni said:

Lesson 7 is not entirely correct 🙂 but yes, you could build a collimator at home with a piece of tubing, etc.

I pretty much followed Astro Baby's guide as it seemed to be where those asking got sent, she just has a cap on the end of the eye piece? 🤔

Edited September 9, 2020 by Markyttt

[vlaiv]

29 minutes ago, AstroMuni said:

Lesson 7 is not entirely correct 🙂 but yes, you could build a collimator at home with a piece of tubing, etc.

Advanced lesson 7 would be - you don't need any accessory to do collimation - go out and point your scope at a star - that is all you need

[Pixies]

2 minutes ago, vlaiv said:

Advanced lesson 7 would be - you don't need any accessory to do collimation - go out and point your scope at a star - that is all you need

Ah - but the initial check of the secondary would be tricky!

 

[Markyttt]

1 minute ago, vlaiv said:

Advanced lesson 7 would be - you don't need any accessory to do collimation - go out and point your scope at a star - that is all you need

Astro's article suggests this is less than ideal using turbulent UK skies 😬  Saying that, whilst I didn't get neat concentric rings, the fuzzy mess was perfectly circular!

[Pixies]

@Markyttt's 6th Law is proving correct:

Lesson no 6 - Collimation is a minefield of differing opinions, methods and equipment

[Dantooine]

On 05/09/2020 at 12:27, Markyttt said:

Hello everyone, another new starter with a load of daft newbie questions 🙂

I've had a telescope before but it was a cheap thing my brother gave me that was only truly good at taking up space in my house....

Move forward a decade, take a Saturday night, add in a documentary about Voyager, a nice bottle of red, and a laptop and I woke up to discover I'd purchased a Skyliner 250px!

Setup was straight forward and got a bit of clear sky on the first night so pointed it at the things I really wanted to see, the planets.

Unfortunately, it turned Mars from a microscopic red dot into a miniscule red dot. I had better luck with Saturn which went from a star sized dot into a wee white spot with rings!

First lesson learnt, buying a big-ish telescope doesn't mean I can actually see distant planets.

Whilst setting up the finder scope I learnt lesson number two. Aimed the finder at the only star I could see, moved to the eyepiece to find that my empty sky was in fact FULL of stars. So lesson two was that the big mirror at the bottom was actually to collect light, not to allow me to see Jupiter's great red spot.

The third lesson hasn't been completed but I know from my SLR that buying cheap accessories almost always leads to disappointment. Knowing this hasn't stopped me from buying a cheap barlow and cheap 6mm & 8mm eyepieces. Yet to be delivered but I suspect they'll be used only once.

I spent some time trawling through threads on the forums today but really got lost in all the jargon. I tried asking Google translate what a 14mm DSO 70 deg TS BST ED AFOV plossi was but it mumbled something about Mandarin Chinese then crashed my web browser...

So, rather than continue to order cheap tat from the interweb I'd like to ask the experts here.

Seems like nice big planets are out (although there are threads here that great views of Jupiter can be had) and that I should focus on stars?

Presume I'd need :

- a single decent mid zoom eye piece and stick to the basics for now.

- some sort of filter so the moon looks like the moon, not the sun.

- maybe a telrad as I'm not loving the stock finder

Anything else for an absolute beginner? And what would you recommend I point the scope at to begin with? Something that is easy to find but provides a view that will make me say 'wow'!

Stupid questions I'm sure, sorry....

This has made me smile. There are more clever people than me on here so I will let them answer. It will all be fine. 

[turboscrew]

About the eyepieces: watch out for F-ratios the eyepieces are meant for. On the FLO pages it says about BST StarGuide eyepieces: "Suitable for use with telescope focal-ratios f/5 and above". That is, not for OP nor me. Plössls work fine with even fast scopes, but there is a dependency between eye relief and focal length. That's why <5 mm focal length Plössls are not abundant. Their eye relief begins to be  painfully small. Also orthoscopic are good. Plössls and orthoscopics are not very expensive either.

Usually wide angle eyepieces have so many lenses that they tend to be suboptimal for fast telescopes.

My tube is 300 mm / 1200 mm, F/4. I can relate to the OP's pain.

My latest purhases are TeleVue Plössl 15 mm and Baader classic ortho 6 mm, but I'm still under new equipment curse.

 

Edited September 9, 2020 by turboscrew

[RT65CB-SWL]

I too, have the TeleVue 15mm Plossl and Circle-T 6mm & 12.5mm Ortho... (plus a 6mm/0.965" Ortho and 1.25" adaptor).

<--- my 6mm/0.965" Ortho and 1.25" adapter.

<--- my Circle-T 6mm & 12.5mm Ortho's.

 

All are very nice e/p's for lunar and planetary viewing.

Edited September 11, 2020 by Philip R

[AstroMuni]

21 hours ago, vlaiv said:

Advanced lesson 7 would be - you don't need any accessory to do collimation - go out and point your scope at a star - that is all you need

And an eyepiece that gives a high enough magnification to generate an airy disk I have come across many a post where folk have confused the out of focus white circle with the shadow of secondary + spider vanes to be the airy disk.

[Erling G-P]

On 09/09/2020 at 20:10, Dantooine said:

This has made me smile. There are more clever people than me on here so I will let them answer. It will all be fine. 

Me too - the one about the moon had me in stitches; just a couple of days before I was looking at Jupiter & Saturn with my 200PDS and decided to swing it round to the nearby, nearly full moon.  Almost burned out my eye, and blinded me to the point of hardly being able to find my way around my own garden.. 🤣

[turboscrew]

On 05/09/2020 at 17:16, Markyttt said:

@vlaiv-  that's a really good answer, and the videos are great (if a little depressing 😂). Don't get me wrong, I'm in awe of the night sky, I've been lucky enough to travel to places where even with the naked eye, the views are amazing. I think the expectation vs reality part of the video really sums things up. There's plenty of posts here including nice images of the planets and galaxies so , like an idiot, I thought that simply buying a decent telescope would provide me with the same views. All hobbies needs some time and love to bear fruit, this will be no different. I suppose where things are different is that I can get my standard crop dSLR, point it at the sky, open the shutter and take great photos of the moon/milky way without any special kit, the telescope will clearly take a little more patience.

@sputniksteve - Stock 10mm eye piece, suspect the issue is probably more to do with current position of Saturn (just above my horizon) & light pollution than stock optics.

@Philip R - It was the jokes about whether one needed a collimater to collimate a collimater that made me join the forum 😊

Some people refuse to look at anything below 30°. Low at the horizon you can really see good images - in fact many of them, of different colours and on top of each other. The atmospheric dispersion... 😉

 

[Dantooine]

44 minutes ago, turboscrew said:

Some people refuse to look at anything below 30°. Low at the horizon you can really see good images - in fact many of them, of different colours and on top of each other. The atmospheric dispersion... 😉

 

I thought I had black & white eyepieces until a plane flew through my FOV 😎

[Markyttt]

I'm back! And I've learnt some more lessons!

Lesson no 9 - When revisiting collimation, *DO NOT* wind out all of the secondary mirror screws to see what happens. This is a bad thing and will take much time and many terrible swear words to correct.

Lesson no 10 - There's a decent chance that the assortment of collimation tools now owned due to lesson 9 will all for some reason give slightly different results.

Lesson no 11 - Whilst joining a a local astronomy club would be the solution to the above issues, these apparently don't run in the midst of a global pandemic. We're allowed to go to the pub, to go shopping, we must go back to work, and I'm told group grouse shooting is just fine. But no standing in fields in the night looking at the stars. This is forbidden.

Lesson no 12 - After a lifetime of asking professionals for advice, and then gently ignoring it, I'm still surprised at how much better the BST eye pieces that were recommended are than the cheap things I initially chose from eBay.

Lesson no 13 - Lesson 12 will without doubt be unlearnt by the end of the day.

Lesson no 14 - Collimation is annoying.