super website

[couleurblue]

Hi all,

This is a wonderful website for beginners like me.Take a look.

Digital Images of the Sky

Enjoy. Gordon.

[Capricorn]

Agreed that the pic's are good but I am always bothered by these. You have found it but do you now expect to see something similar? M31 looks nothing like the image they have posted through a scope.

Many people do expect to see similar, then get very disappointed when all they can manage is a little bit of grey fuzz that resembles nothing at all. Read the posts on this site that say this.

Many of the images are "coloured" by artists, all are enhanced/processed in some way.

My PC at work has images from Chandra as the background, they look good, but Chandra is an X-ray telescope so what are the colours and as they are X-rays I can never see what it produces.

I suppose the thought process is that someone looks at a site like this, see's the images posted in the link, then read that people often start with something like a 150P, so assume that you can see the images as posted with a 150P.

[couleurblue]

Well there is more to the site than just pictures through scopes of course.It shows ,for example,what constellations are visible each month this year, and what of interest is in them,and exact positions

of these objects,and so on.I guess if your not a newbie,then it is not for you.

[couleurblue]

Also,there are some great links...e.g. the web nebular link,which give a huge amount of imformation on the planets,and what can be achieved with very modest instruments!!!!!!!!

[John]

It's an interesting web site but I agree with Capricorn that it's important that newcomers to the hobby understand that the views visually through a telescope will never match the images that can be taken through it. Our eyes just can't compete with CCD's and the amazing image processing facilities available to amateurs.

It's one of the commonest issues encoutered when people start the hobby and can lead to real dissapointment if we can't do a bit of gentle "expectation management" before they look through a scope.

[Capricorn]

I wasn't criticising the web site nor it's contents or links. I have the Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer site's in my favourites and select a new picture about every couple of weeks at work as a background. For that they are great. Hubble has probably done more for astronomy then anything else (perhaps Galileo really did more by starting it off ).

But when people see those images then see the same on the box of a £120 scope they make the connection that they can buy, set up and see identical images.

There are posts on this site of people with a 130P and expecting to see the canals and ice caps of Mars in detail. I have lost count of new observers wondering why M31 isn't like the pictures from Hubble and wanting to know how to set their scope up so it will be.