Beginning Astronomy?

AnalogBoy asks: "I figure, with the diverse backgrounds offered here on Slashdot, at least 1(,000) of you would have an astronomy background, in some way, shape, or form. I've always had a passing interest in all things space, in particular, i've always been captivated by whats 'out there'. I was wondering if any of youse guys had suggestions on books, programs (Windows or Unix), and especially GOOD telescopes (Sub-$500-range). I've looked through Google, etc - but I want a community opinion! "

Comments

Telescopes

[Slipped_Disk]

Check out http://www.telescopes-earth.com , they have a fairly good selection of telescopes from
cheap $100 models to several thousand dollar scopes with integrated GPS and Star Finder systems.

I personally have a Celestron C-102 (lists for just over $500 on their site) which isn't the greatest scope in the world but I find it more than adequate.

The site also sells accessories (additional lenses, filters, etc), which are useful for people like me who usually have a camera attached to their telescope :)

To be honest

[Unknown Poltroon]

While i love astronomy as an interest, ive always found telescopes to be somewhat usless in terms of finding out whats out there. I mean, dont get me wrong, its great fun to take a look at planets and such through them, but ive always found reading about it more interesting, since theres only so much i can find out by looking up myself.

XEphem

[archnerd]

XEphem, is, hands down, the best astronomy program for any OS. You can get it at www.clearskyinstitute.org. The program itself is open source and includes a database of a few thousand stars plus the messier object. For a fair price, you can get three CDROMs that include binaries, an installation program, and a much-expanded database. XEphem is the best collection of astronomy resources I've ever seen for the PC, including everything you could possibly want to know about a given object. It also includes a driver for controlling LX-200 compatible telescopes. I use this program every night and intend to register it.

Astronomy software ...

[tjwhaynes]

If you get a decent telescope with a decent CCD camera, you can do a lot of semi-serious astronomy with the tools available in the academic astronomy community. While these tools lack something in the pretty front-end department, their underlying image processing algorithms and catalogue analysis software is capable of some serious data crunching.

The first thing you should get hold of Xephem - a pretty good starmap/night sky program useful for locating things you want to observe. Once you have that, you should get some heavy duty image software, such as IRAF which I used extensively during my PhD. Take time to read the documentation available and absorb the methods used for analysing optical images - plenty of papers reveal in detail the methods used to identify objects and classify them according to morphology, colour profile or similar.

There are other sky plate analysis packages out there. Look for SExtractor (Source extractor) which some people prefer and which may make a better job of analysing nearby galaxies.

Also look out for tools in the links off a lot of these academic pages - there are lots of tricks available to flat-field images properly and get good catalogues built. If you are used to driving things from the command line you'll feel right at home. If you are used to GUIs with everything the learning curve will be steeper... But read papers on analysing optical CCD images - the http://xxx.lanl.gov/ preprint server gives you searchable access to lots of astro-ph preprints.

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Re:start with binoculars

[PD]

Gotta come right back at you...

I never said get a 12 inch CAT instead of binoculars. I said get a telescope.

You suggest 10x50's. Have you checked the weight on those puppies? Well, let's go to Orion's website and see. BTW, if you MUST get binocs, Orion makes some damn fine ones. Don't go to KMart and buy Tasco crap if you can help it. Anyway, here's Orion's website.

This page says that 10x50 binocs weigh 28 ounces. That's almost 2 pounds! Now how long is that going to be comfortable to hold over your head? Not long. Observing with unmounted binoculars is a great way to get someone to dislike Astronomy.

I'd recommend a small dobsonian, say a 4.5 inch or a 6 inch. Another great scope (which I own) is the Edmund Scientific Astroscan. It's a 4.5 inch Newtonian in a funky looking mount that is incredibly stable and easy to use. The magnification with the eyepiece that comes with it is 16X, which is PERFECT for a beginner.

Here is the Astroscan's page on Edmund's site. I cannot recommend this scope highly enough. It will show you far more than binoculars, you don't have to hold heavy binoculars over your head, it's a real telescope, it's quality built, it's easy to use, it has nice bright images (I can easily see the Veil with mine), it has very very easy setup, it's easy to find objects in the sky (it has a 3 degree field of view), it's completely manual (making the process of learning the sky a PART of observing rather than a tedious memorization process), and it's inexpensive.