Stargazing Thread

[quantumspirit]

I just bought a telescope, 4.5 inch reflector, Orion ShortTube, and the manual comes with some really good advice I've never had before. It says maximum practical magnification is 45 - 60x for every inch, anything more is an advertising gimick. I suppose you can go over, but you give up quality. Maybe you could tell me how you do it!

Some other good advice is that seeing is best away from asphalt, which radiates heat, and after midnight, when most of the heat has been radiated into space.

Magnification - more is not always better. For moon, do not exceed 50x. High mag., upto 750x, is best for planets like Jupiter and Saturn.

Stellarium is a good shareware program for mapping the sky and gives declination and right ascension of any object. Just google "stellarium"!

 

[icedtea]

Have you checked out Jack Horkheimer? His site is really helpful.

 

[Stellar Vision]

That's the size of the first telescope I got and still have. It's been a while since I've messed with the eyepieces and such, but I would say to cap it at about 100x. Take 45x/in * 4.5in and you end up with 202.5x, but that is probably in ideal pitch black conditions with very steady air. Also is it on an alt/azimuth (Dobsonian) mount, or an equatorial mount? If it's an equatorial like mine, you can polar align the thing and make it much easier to track objects at high magnification.

Other than that my advice would be to pack warm clothes (even in the Summer) and lug your new scope out to a really dark site away from the city at least once. I took some binoculars out to my astronomy club's observing site and was in shear awe at how effortless is was to find objects in such a dark sky. That reminds me, take some binoculars with you too.

 

[MagnumMike]

My brother has a very powerful telescope, and he tells me he's seen some amazing stuff out there.

I would like to get into star-gazing and I'll start looking at telescopes. One doesn't need to look through a telescope to appreciate the wonders of the universe God created. When you look at earth, even within our own Milky Way galaxy, it's like a baseball somewhere on the mainland states! And that's just the Milky Way Galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, which is the closest to the Milky Way, with light traveling at 167,000 miles per hour, it takes about 1000 years to get there, and compared to the entire universe, the Milky Way, for as vast as it is, it would be like a basketball on the north American continent! When you see those beautiful lights in the sky at night, and think about how long that light has taken to travel through space to reach earth, in some cases, you might be looking at the distant star or galaxy in its relative time as it was hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of years ago, because it's taken the light that long to reach earth!

God bless!

 

[STevensSA]

Ive had my 8" Celestron for a while now. The heavens due declare the glory of God.
Another recommendation for beginner astronomers is to see about obtaining a good astronomy software program.
I have both Starry Night and The Sky set up on my tablet pc which interfaces flawlessly with the telescopes Nextstar controller.
Another thing I would like to stress is make sure that you have reasonable expectations when you get a telescope. We see so many images from the Hubble or images captured through CCDs. With the limited amount of light that actually collects in the tube of a telescope you will not be witnessing the color that is prevalent in those images.
The majority of my viewing now is focused on Jupiter which unfortunately in the north stays rather low on the horizon. On any given semi-clear night I can make out the cloud bands and the "great red spot". when the seeing conditions are really good I can make out the shadows on the surface from the moons passing in front of the planet.
I have given up on my 6mm eyepiece and rarely use my 12mm. I favor a 32mm which I will throw my 2x barlow when I need the extra magnification.

Glad I ran across this thread and I pray that the Lord blesses you all with clear dark skies.

Lets keep this one active

 

[Marie87]

I love watching the stars glow in the night time skies. Each one connecting to another to form many shapes around the globe. Telling us what season it is by the constilations.

 

[bluemarkus]

hi there...
so funny when we think of god we always are so earth centered, but it says that earth is his footstool and heaven is his throne.

ok i started in switzerland this fall, i was stuck at this base and nothing to do in the village. then i realized the nights were cold and clear sky. and i started to wonder what this weird flash was that was just out of my window every night. it was the girdle stars of orion. then i downloaded stellarium and it prety muchrocked my world. now back at my dads place my brother has apretty cheap refractor, like 700mm to70mm, but you already can see the moon and stars that you could never see with the blank eye. now i wanted to try a newton reflector soon, and bought one from ebay for 50 bucks. of course its cheap stuff so far, but already rocks my world, this is all REAL baby although we never really see it.there could be kazillions of other solar systems out there. why should god create all this stuff if not for life, its in his character to share his life with other beings.

ah and my cousin also got a new telescope, a nexstar 4 or something. it is computerdriven and does skyalign and you just have to click some buttons to find stuff, which is cool to learn the sky.

ok cheers for now

MB from germany

 

[Yorkshireman]

Astronomy is just the best hobby! I've always loved Moon-and-planet-spotting, watching Mars, the moons of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn. In the last couple of years I've been having a go at astrophotography as well, which with modern digital cameras is really easy. Certainly my setup is not expensive - a 4.5" newtonian, and a Samsung point and shoot digital camera looking straight down the eyepiece.
Last year I took a holiday in the Libyan Sahara near the Akakus mountains, and spent a few nights sleeping under the stars. One night I woke up and the Milky Way was right overhead, I was looking into the core of our Galaxy. A stunning sight!

 

[RedLioness]

I love stargazing! You know, Florida gets a lot of falling meteorites.