Hi All,
Quote:
Originally Posted by mental4astro
The BEST scope is the one that gets used.
... There is soooo much hype, demonizing and scaremongering about collimating Newts that it is astounding. It is only aligning the mirrors, nothing more, nothing less. And ALL the hype exclusively stems from the word " "collimation"    
There is nothing demonic about the collimation process. Remember that a Newt is a scope where the optics are not rigidly held in place, but in spring loaded mechanisms, so if subjected to vibrations, say from a car or setting up and taking down, things can move. And any movement is only very small. Ok, so you need to tweak a screw or two 1/16th of a turn, big deal! The optics will not be horribly misaligned. It's done at the start of your session and you know that if you spend the 2 min that it will take AT MOST, the scope will be performing its very best for you! 
Don't make "collimation" your excuse for not getting a big aperture if that's what you really want. More significant is do you have the space to store it and a car to transport it if you need to. Those are much more pressing issues to consider.
Alex. |
Never a truer word said.
So good in fact, I'll say it again: The telescope that's best for you, is the 'scope you will use most.
There is absolutely no point at all in getting any telescope that's going to sit in a corner, gather dust and make you feel guilty that you aren't using it, but instead prefer another. Everyone's cup of tea is a bit different.
Yes, Newtonians, unless they are permanently mounted do need to be collimated before use. Would knowing that you had to tune a guitar before you can play it put you off buying a guitar? I mean, tuning a guitar is such an incredible hassle, it takes ages and ages and is so, so fiddly.
Like most things in life that are skill-based (as opposed to talent-based) collimating any telescope takes just a bit of learning but really isn't hard at all with the right tools. The more you do it, the quicker you will get at doing it and before long, it takes no more than a minute or few to get right.
One thing I will take issue with Alex here (in a later comment) is about the difficulty of collimating an f/4 as opposed to, say, an f/6. I guess you are technically correct here Alex: It is no harder to collimate faster f/ratios, but the reality is, slower f/ratios are more tolerant of slight mis-collimation than fast ones. At say f/6 a newtonian that is slightly off perfection will be hard to pick from one that's spot on. At f/4, the tolerances between great and yuck become exceedingly small.
As others have said, guilt should never play a role in choosing a telescope. There are good reasons to pick a big-un, there are good reasons to pick a little-un. There are good reasons to pick a Newtonian, there are good reasons to pick a Schmidt-Cassegrainian or a refractor. Where the balance point is, will depend on how you rank (and how much weight is accorded to) the following factors: cost, ease of portability, ease of use, image fidelity, light-gathering and your own life-circumstances..
Best,
L.