Telescopes

Archive for October, 2009

Hi, i’m very found of sky gazing. But i don’t have any idea what type of Telescope in suitable for me. Please suggest the type of telescopes available and where could i buy those in bangalore.

Don’t know myself (I’m in the U.S.), but talk with these folks and see if they might be able to help -
http://www.bas.org.in/Home/

Im new to astronomy I got a meade 16" lightbridge Telescope really cheap it came with a 24mm eyepiece.I saw saturn tonight it looked small but clear i was expecting a bit more from such a big telescope my back is killing me.so can someone tell me what eyepieces are good for this scope someone told me televue are good but there are a few so help please?

Expectations can be discouraging. Since you are new to the hobby, you perhaps did not know what to really expect, but thought that you would see much more with such an impressive scope. The truth is that the planets don’t look that much better in this scope than they do in some smaller ones. The advantage in a 16 inch aperture is with seeing deep sky objects. And the real advantage is seeing the real dim ones, which will still look real dim in your scope. It’s just that with a smaller aperture, you would never see them at all.

Is your 24 mm eyepiece a 2 inch or a 1.25 inch version? If you have the money to buy new gear, I would seriously consider moving to a 2 inch format for all of your eyepieces. The best ones you can buy are Televue Naglers (82 degree apparent field of view) or Televue Ethos (100 degree apparent field of view). These eyepieces will make you grasp the sides of the scope to keep from falling in.

There are other good eyepieces out there. The Celestron Axiom series is excellent, and the Televue Panoptics are also very good.

Once you buy a premium eyepiece, you will never go back. It’s like getting a different scope. They are expensive, but they are the heart of your instrument.

I assume that you already understand magnification (this may not be a good assumption). Since your scope’s focal length is 1829 mm, you can divide that by the eyepiece focal length to determine the magnification. So your 24 mm eyepiece was giving you about 1829 / 24 = 75x or so. You could get a slightly better view of Saturn with a little more magnification, but I wouldn’t go much beyond 100x, and frankly, the low mag eyepieces are better for most targets.

You may want to visit a couple of star parties organized by your local amateur astronomy club. Saturn is a wonderful target, but that scope will let you see a whole lot more, and you should perhaps re-adjust your expectations with a little help from folks with a bit more experience. I will guarantee that they will help you.

I’m doing a project involving telescopes and part of it is to do with the Yerks observatoy telescope and I was wondering if someone could tell me what it is actually used for? And maybe links to some pictures that have been taken from it?
I know it’s the worlds largest telescope, what I need to know is what it is or was used for?
I meant -refracting- telescope

Well I can tell you that it is the largest refracting telescope built and also one of the last due to the fact of it being an almost obsolete technology since reflecting telescopes took over, due to them being cheaper to build and they do not suffer from chromatic aberration. I could go into further detail but somethings to look up for a good start are the differences between reflecting and refracting Telescopes, and chromatic aberration.