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Old 11-05-2017, 03:25 PM
Jemmex (Jem)
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What have I done?

I think I'm in trouble. In a moment of weakness I have ordered a Celestron sct 127 slt goto!

I had a 10 inch dob that I bought many years ago but only saw starlight half a dozen times. I found it too cumbersome to get out of shed. Too hard to point and move. I could never find anything beyond the 5planets and if I did stumble across a dso I never knew what I was looking at. So the dibs was given to a family member - who never used it! I might ask for it back

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
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Old 11-05-2017, 04:04 PM
vaztr (Andrew)
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Hahaha

It will be cloudy for a month once the scope arrives and then you'll spend all your money inside!!!
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Old 11-05-2017, 04:29 PM
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Atmos (Colin)
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Your best telescope is the one that gets used the most.
I have a 12" Go-To dob BUT it rarely gets used as I use my lowly 4" for 99% of my views.
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Old 11-05-2017, 09:50 PM
Wavytone
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Sorry to say this but a 5" is too small to be much good for DSOs. In dark skies 7" or 8" aperture is where it gets interesting. In light polluted suburbia you should have kept the 10".

The alternative is to forget DSOs and consign yourself to being a lunar and planetry kind of guy. Maybe not a bad thing if you only get out occasionally.

By way of example at Blackheath recently under superb sky, we had a 130mm triplet APO, a 150mm mak and 180mm mak.

What was interesting is that the 180mm could show markarians chain quite nicely. In the 150 you saw the "eyes". In the 130... fuggedit.

The 180 was also just able to pull in lots of the mag 9-10 faint fuzzies around Leo, though these were all hopeless in the smaller scopes.
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Old 11-05-2017, 09:50 PM
SkyWatch (Dean)
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They look like a great little scope Jem, and you will have a lot of fun with that!
As for the cold nights out: that's what gloves, scarfs and coats are for! No problem.

Have fun.

Dean
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Old 11-05-2017, 09:55 PM
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jenchris (Jennifer)
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That's often what I advise for those who live in light polluted areas.
You'll never find anything with a dib.
I can almost guarantee you will be delighted and end up with an 8inch .... maybe one on an eq so you can slide the slippery slope of AP
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Old 12-05-2017, 06:34 AM
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Atmos (Colin)
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I agree with Wavytone, a 5" is not overly DSO friendly. Under dark skies I have found some planetary Nebula and galaxies with a 5" but it just doesn't have the aperture to show anything more than a slight fuzz, you cannot push the magnification.

99% of my observing is done with a 4" in short sessions looking at the moon, planets and sometimes some double stars. A few months ago I was quite excited to be able to see the E&F stars in the trapezium (Orion Nebula) while binoviewing.

In short, it's about accepting your aperture and just looking at what it shows well.
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Old 12-05-2017, 12:35 PM
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Nebulous (Chris)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jemmex View Post

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 View Post

In short, it's about accepting your aperture and just looking at what it shows well.
+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

Last edited by Nebulous; 12-05-2017 at 04:45 PM.
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Old 14-05-2017, 08:57 AM
Orionskies (Julian)
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I think as a newbie too I've gotten a lot of unexpected enjoyment with naked eye star gazing. It's great just being able to identity constellations and track them thru the seasons along with the planets. And all those satellites, ISS and shooting stars the night sky really comes alive at times.

Julian
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Old 15-05-2017, 09:19 AM
N1 (Mirko)
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Hi Jem, I totally agree with others that background knowledge about your targets adds to the experience tremedously.

Don't worry about the supposed limitations of your scope. Point it at wheatever you want and see for yourself. Read up on your targets. Use your 10" for comparison whenever it suits (these two are actually a great pair). That's how you gain experience, and that's how you make an informed decision if you ever do decide to upsize, not by avoiding an entire field of visual observing outright. Viewing DSOs can be done with no telescope at all using just the few mm of aperture of your pupils. Now imagine the improvement your 127mm will give you over that. For the same improvement again...well let's just say it's more than 10". Or 20. Or 50. I know this is a silly argument, but so is the suggestion that you can't look beyond the solar system unless your scope has [insert random number here] inches of aperture.
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Old 15-05-2017, 05:34 PM
Neil
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Aperture is not a problem to view DSO, all you need to add is a camera, be it a CCD or DSLR, of course that is a simple statement to make as we all know it will take a little more equipment, but hey that's all part of the fun,good luck and clear skies.
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Old 16-05-2017, 04:57 AM
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Atmos (Colin)
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One other thing to remember is LOCATION!
A 5" refractor at a dark site beats a 12" dob in the city! This isn't always true as on a good night the extra aperture will help with bright objects (moon, planets and some globular clusters) but I've seen galaxies (faint smudgy hazy) and planetary Nebula in my 5" that I would never expect to see with my 12" at home.
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Old 19-05-2017, 09:36 AM
Jemmex (Jem)
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We have had beautiful nights here the last few weeks
I took delivery of the celestron and rushed it home.

yeh.... its raining.

My thought being a 5" easy to use scope that I actually look thru far beats a 10" behemoth that is too hard to get out of shed (Steps etc) and I cant find anything with, so has a lovely patina of dust.

Mind you I sometimes scan randomly with the dobs and gasp when I do stumble across something... then wonder.. what am I seeing?
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Old 19-05-2017, 11:09 PM
SkyWatch (Dean)
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Congratulations on the arrival of the new scope. Eventually it will stop raining...!


The best scope is the one you use, so I reckon your thinking is spot on: and you will see an enormous number of objects in that scope!

Enjoy.
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