How To Use Telescopes : Telescope Maintenance
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009 at
8:00 am
Clean telescope lenses and mirrors only every few years and never use a T-shirt or finger to wipe viewing surfaces. Maintain a telescope in working order with an observatory director in this free a...
US $81.45
thx alot
The Hubble should be orbiting Mars,before decomissioning it, to get some pictures of PLUTO, or Saturn!! I loved to see those pictures!!!
hmmm, now how green is the equipment being used to build the building?
Besides proper tension and inspecting for wear / rot you really have to keep an eye on the belt "sprockets". If a sprocket picks up some gravel / stones they can act like a punch perforating and weakening your belt. Eventually a small puncture of the belt will become a failure point so make sure the sprockets don't get anything wedged in the ridges.
Depends on a lot of factors such as what is your primary interest such as solar system objects like planets, moon, sun, etc or deep space objects such as galaxies, nebula etc. Also depends on how dark your local sky is and also whether you plan to travel to remote dark sites to observe.
A small refractor in the 80 to 100mm range would be a good starter scope. Also you may consider a dobsonian reflector which provides more aperture relative to price. Orion, Meade and Vixen all make good inexpensive refractors in the 90mm range that cost under $400 including equatorial mount. An 8" dobsonian reflector from Orion would run about $300.
The refractor will give sharper images but the dobsonian will cost a bit less and pick up fainter objects. With a 90mm refractor you should be able to make out some bands on Jupiter and see several moons as they orbit Jupiter. Also you should be able to see the rings of Saturn. The views won't be super spectacular like you see in magazines but still very nice for a true enthusiast. The 8 inch Dobsonian will show you even more detail but this type of mount is more difficult to use while tracking objects as they move across the sky.
Stay away from brands like Tasco and Jason etc sold at department stores. They advertise things like 600X magnification but that is nothing but sales hype. You will be quickly disappointed and selling the scope for much less on Ebay. The more important measure of a scope is aperture and optical quality. Aperture is the diameter of the primary mirror or lens. The larger the aperture the more light it will gather and therefore more detail will be visible assuming the optics are decent quality.
For under $300, I would get an Orion 8 inch dobsonian reflector. For $500 I would get the Orion Astroview 120ST or a ten inch dobsonian. For less than $200 I would not even waste it on a cheap scope. I would instead get a decent pair of binoculars for around $100, which is surprisingly good for stargazing, comet watching, DSO spotting plus much more portable and fun to use than any 60mm scope on a flimsy alt-azimuth mount.
Check out Orion Scopes at http://www.telescopes.com or
(PhysOrg.com) — New, ground-breaking thermal images obtained with powerful ground-based telescopes show swirls of warmer air and cooler regions never seen before within Jupiter’s Great Red Spot.
“This picture shows the famous Orion nebula, one of the galaxy’s largest and most active star forming gas clouds. Spitzer is an infrared telescope, so blue here depicts light at 3.6 microns, roughly 5 times the wavelength your eye can see, and red/orange is 4.5 microns.”