Quote:
Originally Posted by Jemmex
My idea being the sct can find and show me dso then when I know what and where it is I can get a real look thru the dob
The 127 hasn't arrived yet but I'm afraid I will catch the bug and spend all my cold nights outside now |
Cold is no problem - win the war with wool and whisky.
The 127 Celestron sounds like a delightful tool to have! I’m sure you’ll have many enjoyable hours of viewing with it. Whether or not you get the 10” Dob back, if you want more detailed information about what you’ve seen you can always just switch another source such as the internet. Pretty much anything that’s listed as an interesting target will have been viewed and photographed many times by much more powerful gear than you or I will probably ever own.
Fortunately, I find that my very modest telescopes are more than enough to allow me to explore the beauty of the night skies. In fact, extra power can even become “too much information” as the view gets crammed with more and more dots of light.
I know that nothing I could afford could ever get me even remotely “close” in any real sense, so any extra detail I might be able to see will only ever be a tiny fraction what’s actually out there. I figure that if professional astronomers can sit in comfortable chairs viewing images from giant telescopes and distant spacecraft on computer screens, then so can I.
I intend to skip the in-between step where I mortgage my house for what would still be a very distant view. Well, for now at least.....
Quote:
Originally Posted by Atmos
In short, it's about accepting your aperture and just looking at what it shows well.
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+1
I think that Colin is exactly right. We're never going to have a Hubble in our own backyards, so the trick is to find what works best for us with the gear we have.
There’s a great ‘sticky’ post above (Article: Part 1 - General Principles for Choosing your first Telescope) written by Brian Nolan, in which he makes the point that astronomy is “largely a conceptual hobby”, because what we mostly actually see are collections of small dots. The most important factors are the knowledge you have about what you’re looking at (mostly gained from reading and conversations), and the quality of your imagination.
IMO, the power of your imagination and knowledge is FAR more important than the power of your telsecope. Anything we buy today will almost certainly be better than what Galilieo had.
Like many people here, I now have more than one telescope and a range of magnifications available but the one I use the most is the cheapest of them all - an 80x400 refractor with a 25mm eyepiece. “Settting up” involves nothing more than carrying it outside and removing the lens caps. I can start scanning the skies in seconds. Any of the pioneer astronomers of past centuries would have been thrilled to own such a tool, and would have got a lifetime's worth of work and wonder from it. I reckon that if I can’t do the same, then the failure lies with me, not the telescope.
All the best with your splendid new asset,
Cheers,
Chris