Slashdot Mirror
Telescopes for Home Use?
PDubNYC asks: "Just thought this was a good place to ask about telescopes. My father is turning 70 shortly, and I thought a telescope would be a good gift as he was an air force navigator back in the day, and loves viewing nature's beauty (bird watching, safaris etc...). So, any ideas what to look for in a home telescope, from $500-$1000 (split by 6 kids) that would enable him to punch in coordinates and have the motor turn, give a great view of nearby celestial bodies (maybe Saturn's rings), and it'd be great to hook up to a laptop (a Mac would be even better, but far from necessary). Any advice would be great." PDubNYC is also on a budget, so please refrain from suggesting the ultra expensive $1500 scopes.
Get the largest aperature you can afford. Both Meade & Celestron make models with an 8" apperature with auto goto in the price range you suggest. You can easily hook either of them up to a laptop by using a webcam. Sample photos from a webcam of Jupiter can be found here.
Use a Philips webcam (Forget the name of it, but it is mentioned on the web page listed above) because it has the most sensitive CCD of the webcams, and takes the best photos. You can also get an adapter for around $20 to hook up the webcam to your computer, or you can easily make one.
Also, if you don't absolutely need the auto goto, you can get a good Dobsonian mounted telescope pretty cheap. Check out Orion Telescopes for some good Dobsonian mounted scopes, and some good Newtonian reflectors in the price range you wanted.
And oh yeah... $1,500 is by no means an ultra expensive telescope! A high quality mirror alone can cost several thousand dollars.
Not that there's any harm in repeating it, but you may want to read the responses from the last time this was asked and the time before that.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I forgot to add in my earlier post, but avoid at all costs any telescope that has advertised on its box that is has x amount of magnification. You don't measure a telescope based on its magnification powers, it is measured on it's light gathering ability. A good rule of thumb is that a telescope will only be able to get 50x magnification under perfect viewing conditions for evey inch of aperature. For example, a 4.5" telescope would only be able to magnify up to 225x, and an 8" would be able to magnify up to 400x. You can easily change the magnification of any scope by changing its eyepiece.
A telescope that is selling itself based solely on it magnification is more than likely an extremely cheap item, and will likely not be able to reach any level near the magnification that it is advertising.
When reading astronomy-related magazines, I have found what I thought waas excellent advice. Instead of investigating in high-priced telescopes, focus your attention on a pair of some of the best binoculars you can find and some star charts. Then, give yourself several months of identifying objects in "constellation XYZ" and see if your still interested in astronomy, with its late nights and great needs for patience. (Add some OpenSource astronomy software, for planning your evenings, and viola!)
Once you've gotten this far, then go buy the scope, armed with patience, excellent astronomy knowledge, a great pair of spotting binoculars, and some star charts you can read.
That way, you won't spend lots of bucks on something that collects dust.
Besides, Galileo would have gone nuts for some great binoculars and star charts.
Yeah, girth is nice (and so is length) but it's what you do with it that really counts...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I would recomend looking at a few guides like this and this.
This sig intentionally left blank.