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Old 05-05-2008, 07:22 PM
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Jeff
Starry Eyed

Jeff is offline
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Wonga Park
Posts: 692
Hi Andyman,

I belive the Focal Length of your scope is 750mm.

My starting out advice would be"
  1. Use your low powered EPs (eg. 32mm=23x magnification, 15mm=50x mag) for panning around to locater stuff, or to view very large objects which won't fit into the Field of View of shorter Focal Length EPs
    => large open star clusters (eg. Pleiades http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Messier_45)
    => large nebulas (eg. Eta Cerina http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_3372)
  2. Medium powers (9mm=83x) are good for closer examination of many objects (most open star clusters, globular clsuters, most nebulas, and for the whole moon ... with a moon filter to dim it down)
  3. High powers (6mm=125x, 4mm=187.5x) for closer views of the moon & planets, or for "splitting" binary/multiple stars (eg. Sirius, Alpha Centauri, Rigel, Procyon, Hadar, Acrux, Antares)
Hope this helps ... I'm sure other more experienced folks will have some good suggestions too. Also helps to have access to some star charts of PC planetarium program to help locate/idenfy stuff. If you don't already have something, the downloading a basic sky may from SkyMaps.com might be handy.
http://www.skymaps.com/skymaps/tesms0805.pdf

Cheers.
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