Hi Ben, thats an awesome scope and will server you well for years to come, you can certainly see all the planets with that scope even with a little star hopping. Depending on light pollution the deep sky objects will be possible with it and will appear in black and white to your eye. You won't see them as bright and colourful through an eyepiece even on bigger scopes like what you see in photos. Photos use data often taken over hours to capture enough to show the nice colours, but our eyes in the dark don't see colours very well so we see in greyscales. The longer you are outside at the eyepiece and dont turn to look at a light/torch/phone screen the better your night vision becomes and the "faint fuzzies" as galaxies and nebulae are often called, become much much clearer to the eyes. Some of them are huge in the eyepiece and their magnitude (brightness) is spread across the whole object so say the Orion nebula which is as bright as a planet and larger in the sky than the moon, can be hard to see with the naked eye because the brightness is across a large area compared to a planet which is tiny.
The blurriness is most likely your seeing condition as others mentioned. When you get down to an 8mm or 6mm eyepiece you are achieving a large magnification (really doesnt mean anything to astronomers) and the water vapour in the atmosphere (roughly 65 miles of it between your eye and the vacuuam of space) refracts photons like trying to examine a pebble at the bottom of a creek from the bank. The view dances and swims a lot. With a 10mm or 12mm eyepiece it should be fairly stable and you need extremely optimal factors and location to use a 4mm or smaller.
Cooldown could also be a factor as other suggested. Dragging a scope outside and immediately looking through the eyepiece is almost guarenteed to give you blurry views. Especially if you kept the scope in a heated room. If you kept it in say the garage (typically unheated) it will be close to the ambient temperature already and take little time to cool down further once you move it outside. Generally put your scope outside and hour before you want to use it to try to let it cool to close to the outside temperature.
Another factor could be your location and the direction you are pointing the scope. For example if you point it across your tiled roof then the heat it absorbed during the day if rising through your field of view and can blur it too (heat rises remember and its like the mirage effect on a hot road). Likewise if you are looking through the air above a nearby busy road as traffic passes the hot air swirls up causing disruptions to viewing. None of these have any reflection on the quality of your scope and happens to everyone.
Using any telescope from suburbia has a lot of inherent limitations that throwing money at better gear wont change. Finding a good dark site to take your scope to away from the heat, humidity and light pollution will show you just how good your scope is. What you see in astrophotos is not that you see through the eyepiece. You can easily see our closest planets though, and their moons, even surface details on Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are easily within the reach of your scope (seeing conditions permitting). Also take note of where the moon is and its phase as it will cause light pollution limiting viewing at times for you. Of course dont forget viewing the moon with your scope is fantastic. It was a damn good choice of scope, your better half proved she's better with that choice. It may not look impressive but at that pricerange and below the impressive looking scopes would ALL be a worse choice for you. I think she got you the perfect scope.
|