I recently brought a Bintel 8" dob and i was wondering what is the best things to look at at this time of the year.
It has a 9mm, 15mm and 30mm eye pieces
The Orion nebula M42 is an easy one to start with. Look for 4 stars in the middle called the Trapezium.
Low in the SE will be the Southern Cross and near the lower one of the side stars is the jewel box cluster. If you move the scope straight up 2 or 3 widths of the southern cross you'll run into the wishing well cluster and the bright Carina nebula - have a general look around that area of the milky way and see what you run into.
Note the brighter orange star in the middle of the carina nebula - see if you can see any detail around it with the 15mm or 9mm eyepiece - needs steady skies.
Then there's the objects near the SMC and LMC mentioned above.
Try your 30mm eyepiece first then see how the objects look with the 15mm.
I've got stellarium and I've added my dob and eye pieces to it.
Is it reliable for what you can see?
Also I'm assuming that I won't see things in colour
Thanks for the help and replys
What you can see depends mostly on how dark or light polluted your viewing location is. You can also see more once you've been in the dark for 15 minutes or so, since chemical changes happen in the eye to improve night vision.
Colour seen in the night sky depends to a degree on an individual's
colour perception; some people can see green or pink tints in some
of the brighter nebulae such as M42[ the Orion Nebula], whilst others
see no colour at all in the same objects. Some stars are obviously
tinted orange/red, and some double stars show different colours from
each other. Some colour is obvious when viewing Mars and Jupiter.
Even very short photographic exposures[ a few seconds] will show a
lot of colour in some objects.
raymo
Get hold of Sky and Telescopes pocket sky atlas, fold back to Orion and see what interests you. After that move on to next page, then the next and so on. Several years later you may finnish it, but what a journey.
