anyone got telescopes?

[our_man]

I just finished looking at Mars an hour ago. Perfect night for stargazing in Ireland. I live in the country too, even better. It was the brightest celestial body in the sky by far.

The only disadvantage is that my knowledge of telescopes is somewhat lacking. Nevertheless, I got Mars in focus eventually. Not what I expected. Without the telescope it had an orange hue about it; with the telescope it was a pale yellow.

I couldn't really make out any features; I had hoped to see the contrast between the colour of the poles and the rest of the planet, but no such luck. Oh well, there's always tomorrow night.

[Whaleboy]

If you have to ask, you can't afford it...not much change from $4000

Ouch! Where you find room for it?

and yes I can afford it

[PLATO]

Thanks! I'll look for it tonight. looks like a clear night from here.

[Whaleboy]

our_man: You need to really concentrate on it to be honest. What mag is your scope?

[MichaeltheGreat]

Originally posted by elijah
MtG: How much is that thing setting you back?

The camera is officially $9,000, but I'm guessing that early limited production and huge demand may well increase that in the secondary market, which isn't controlled by the manufacturer. I might sell it and come out of the deal with an older, but still very nice ST8E or similar, just because of the limited market.

The really cute toy I'd like to have is Stellar Products new (not yet in production, IIRC) AO-5 adaptive optics system, but that thang is going to weigh in at about 50 grand.

I could get a chunk of land in the high desert for less than that to get myself out of a light-polluted and unstable atmosphere, but the idea (at least for photography) with the AO-5 is that I'd get nearly those conditions on the coast, without the hours lost to driving and the wear and tear on the equipment (and my back) in setting up and taking down all the hardware.

[our_man]

Elijah, my scopes maximum magnification is 600x, I'm not too sure what magnification I was using tonight though... For future reference, do you know how much detail of Mars I can make out with a magnification like that?

[Whaleboy]

our_man: A hell of a lot!!!

Look at it like this.. The moon is about 350-400'000 km from Earth.. I forget exact numbers. Its a sixth of the size. Mars now is 60'000'000 away, which is roughly 180 times further away. Its about three times larger than the moon, so you could get about 10 times the detail with your scope now than you can with the moon and the naked eye. Mental calculations there, and I'm probably way off (help me MtG!!!).

[MichaeltheGreat]

Magnification is only part of the issue. What's the aperture and optical type of the scope? A lot of inexperienced people overmagnify, and don't realize that the additional magnfication is offset both by optical limits within the scope and by the inverse square issue wrt magnification - i.e. that with a given scope, doubling the magnification causes a 4x lessening of overall brightness.

At 600x, you're at the limits of optical performance with a top end six incher refractor or Maksutov-Cassegrain design, or a ten incher in the other standard types (SCTs, Newts, etc.). Those limits will get degraded as well on anything other than a truss-rod Newt if you don't give the scope time to adjust to temperature conditions. (differing temperature inside and outside causes air currents within the tube, that distort the images you see, so you have to let the scope equalize to the outside air temperature for an hour or so)

edit - and if you have less than a top end scope and eyepieces, the performance limits are even less, maybe even way less. The key is to get a compromise between brightness and magnification, and if you have wide angle eyepieces instead of Plossl types, use those - the greater eye relief puts a lot less focusing strain on your eyeballs, so you don't lose the ability to focus your eye itself on the eyepiece image.

Small focal length Plossl type eyepieces are notorious for low eye relief, and they really limit you pretty quickly.

[The Mad Monk]

In short, use a lower mag.

[MichaeltheGreat]

Depends on what you got.

If he has a 11" Celestron or 12" Meade, Televue binocular eyepiece adapter, and any good wideangle eyepieces, by all means go for 600x.

[PLATO]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Depends on what you got.

If he has a 11" Celestron or 12" Meade, Televue binocular eyepiece adapter, and any good wideangle eyepieces, by all means go for 600x.

uh...okay. I...uh...got mine at wal-mart for $20. Should I even bother?

[MichaeltheGreat]

It's better than nothing.

[Dinner]

Meade puts out as series of telescopes using Casagrain optics which are supposed to be A+ stuff. As I recall you could by a camera adapter for them for around $150 and you could hook up any SLR camera to the telescope. Heck, Nikon puts out a truly awesume digital camera body mount that you can put on any Nikon SLR. The digital conversion body will set you back about $1500 and the Nikon camera will set you back any where from $500 to $2000 depending on which model and if you buy it used or not but that's still about $6,000 cheaper then MtG's speciality camera and you can use it for normal shots as well.

It'll be almost as good and 1/3 the price.

[our_man]

I'm in way over my head here.

[PLATO]

Originally posted by our_man
I'm in way over my head here.

Me to.