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What can I really see?

Vempire1976

By Vempire1976
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Vempire1976

Vempire1976

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Hello all

I am a complete novice at this but wish to become some what more. My brother has just lent me his 3inch telescope with both a 12.5mm and 20mm eyepiece, as well as an SR4, lunar filter, a 1.5 and 3 Barlow.

I have so far managed to get some good views of the Moon but the stars actually look brighter with my naked eye!!

Any suggestions would be great, but please remember that I am a novice. Thanks in advance!:)

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ollypenrice

ollypenrice

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When things are too dim in a telescope it is usually because you have too much magnification so an eyepiece of longer focal length should be used. The magnification is found by dividing the focal length of the telescpe by that of the eyepiece.

The stars may have looked dimmer simply because they were not the same ones as you saw naked eye. The ones in the scope were probably below the naed eye limit.

Do you have a small finderscope on your brother's instrument? This allows you to know where you are looking but it needs to be aligned during the daytime on a distant object. Both scopes need to point the same way, obviously enough!

Olly

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Vempire1976

Vempire1976

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Defender. Thanks for the link. Ollypenrice, it does have a finder scope but it is rubbish!! I was looking at the Moon last night and it looked great, but then a checked the finder scope (just being curious) and the moon was in the top right hand corner!!

Very confused! However, thanks for the advice about daytime alignment. Will try that later.

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Moonshane

Moonshane

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Defender. Thanks for the link. Ollypenrice, it does have a finder scope but it is rubbish!! I was looking at the Moon last night and it looked great, but then a checked the finder scope (just being curious) and the moon was in the top right hand corner!!

Very confused! However, thanks for the advice about daytime alignment. Will try that later.

the finder will show things upside down and left to right which can be confusing. a right angled finder has a prism in which converts the image to right way up and left to left.

you need to find a distant object (the further the better and obviously be wary of anything in the direction of the sun) as Olly says and then get this in your scope eyepiece (use the widest first). then line up the finder and check the target is still in the scope too. you can then fine tune the finder with a more powerful eyepiece using the same process.

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Slangers

Slangers

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If you stay up late enough to look at Saturn, your scope will be good enough to see the rings. In the early evening take a look a Jupiter. You will see 4 moons- watch for long enough and you will note them changing position. You will also see some banding on the planet. If you can find Orion, look down the belt and find the nebula- it's an easy enough find and amazing to view in any scope. In the early morning have a look at Venus. You should be able to see that, like the moon, it has phases.

Why not download Stellarium- it will show you where these things are in the sky.

One thing you will notice is that because of Earths rotation, objects will drift out of view very quickly- you will need to keep nudging the scope to keep things in your field of viewing.

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Spectre486

Spectre486

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Welcome to SGL :glasses1:

As a general rule of thumb, you want to be using low magnification eyepieces to look at deep space objects (higher mm value on the eyepiece). Using higher mag eyepieces reduces the amount of light getting to your eye.

Bright planets like Jupiter aren't as much of a problem and you can use higher magnification to start to look for detail. The brightness you see is directly linked to the aperture size of your scope (3 inches in your case). The higher the aperture, the more light your scope can gather, and the brighter the object in the eyepiece.

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brantuk

brantuk

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Hi Vempire and welcome to SGL :glasses1:

"Turn Left at Orion" would be a great book for you to get. It was written for small aperture scopes like yours and will take you through your first 100 objects. It tells you how to find them and what they will look like in your scope, as well as loads of other info about the night sky and astronomy generally :)

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Capricorn

Capricorn

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Any more information on the scope, mainly the focal length and a make would be good.

At 3" (75mm) I am guessing it is an achromat, so hopefully it will have a focal length of 600-750mm.

What you can see will depend on the scope and the eyepieces mainly. It should show Jupiter as a small disc, if the magnification makes 60x and above then you should see some bands. Although you will have to be out early when Jupiter may just be high enough. It is that bright thing in the West.

Orion is convenient, few bright stars, the belt and the Orion Nebula. Again 50-60xmagnification is OK.

There are double stars to locate, some have contrasting colours. Web search for a list is easy enough.

After that comes clusters M45 being the easy one, several others that are not so bright but should be fairly easy. All clusters are best viewed with a low power (long focal length eyepiece). It simply has a wider field of view so you see the clustar as a cluster.

Finding things may depend on the light pollution of course.

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