Cactus Game Design Message Boards

Here it is

I also bought a moon filter for the eyepiece and a solar filter for the scope.  I am gonna have me some fun when it arrives in a week!

Oooh looks nice.

A few things to keep in mind:

1. It looks like there is no motor on the stand. This means that you will have to constantly adjust the scope to keep smaller objects in view. You have to counter the rotation of the earth to keep objects in your scope. However, if it has the stand shown, then you should have an easier time. Those mounts are designed specifically to easily rotate with the sky, as opposed to these: http://www.oneminuteastronomer.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/alt_azimuth.jpg

2. While you will definately be able to see a good amount of cool stuff with that scope, It's not going to appear like NASA images. Those photos are the result of several hours of exposure time to bring out all the details and color.

3. I'm guessing you probably just plan to look through it normally for now, but down the road, if you ever decide to try some astrophotography, you're gonna need two things: a motorized mount to smoothly track the sky, and an SLR camera with a special adapter to fit it into the eyepiece slot.

4. How much do you know about the major objects/constellations in the sky? I suggest you download a program called Stellarium. It shows you what's currently in the sky, so you dont spend hours looking for an object only to discover it's below the horizon.  http://www.stellarium.org/

While Astronomy is not what I'm studying, it's always been a major hobby for me. Feel free to ask me about anything related to the telescope or the sky and I'll try my best to answer. 

Pardon my lack of knowledge of observing the cosmos.  I can tell that whatever this is, it's pretty awesome.  What makes it so cool?

Well it is a 5 inch scope so it has some decent power.  I should be able to see most of the major planets pretty well with this one and many of the deep sky objects in our galaxy.  What I am really interested is in using it to try out astrophotography so eventually I will need a scopemounted digital slr camera.  I bought a solar filter so that, when I get the camera, I can image the sun because that is one star that is pretty easy to image!

Have you tried any astrophotography, even without a telescope? It's pretty fun to see the brighter objects suddenly appear in your images, like the Andromeda Galaxy shows up nicely.

I have a fairly old 10 inch? (cant remember exactly) scope, I'd like to get a newer one with a motorized equatorial mount once I settle in to my own place after college. I didn't quite have room for it in my college apartment, but (A) I'm in the city so light pollution is disgusting, and (B) the college has an absolutely monstrous telescope installed in one of the buildings. 32" mirror and a 256" ( 6500 mm ) focal length. However, it was installed a while ago, and everyone who used it then no longer works at the college. So... we kinda have to figure out every aspect of it on our own. Like, we just found out it has a second filter wheel inside it this month. XD We've been getting some aweful artifacts on our images too, like... 50 to 70% of our shots are ruined, and this is rather annoying when each exposure is 30-200 seconds long.

We managed to at least get enough shots to make this image two weeks ago, some nice details are visible: http://i189.photobucket.com/albums/z18/Lambo_Diablo_Svtt/Orion-Attempt-2.jpg

Also, that image is minimally cropped, thats about how much of the sky you can see at one time in that scope. I think a full shot of Andromeda would take at least 8-10 shots mosaic'd together.