|
Hello Cameron,
I use various scopes for outreach and have found that aperture fever is not something the visitors suffer from.
Some nights is set up a 60mm refractor and a 101mm refractor side by side yet the responses from visitors are quite similar, the key being to choose appropriate targets for the scopes.
Other times I take the 5” Tak and the 18” Dob and setup the Tak to track a planet or the moon or an open cluster and steer the 18” toward globulars or nebulae all the while giving the visitors a running commentary on the targets and also an indication of distances.
To the novice all stars seem to be the same distance away, it’s when you tell them that they are looking at the object not how it is but how it was a certain amount of time ago that they start to get a handle on distances…..
The seeing often decides how much aperture and how much magnification is “correct” for the conditions but most people attending outreach events really want to see the showpiece objects like Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, lunar craters, M42, ETA Carinae, Omega Cent etc….
Regards the WOW factor, the difference from 8 to 10 to 12 is unlikely to really matter to most first time visitors, more important is to give them context by describing what they are looking at and how the object came to be… etc
|