Stars / Astronomy / Astrophotography / Telescopes / Astro

The summer sky is a bit dull, winter is a lot more interesting: Messier 42, Pleiades, Betelgeuse.

Sell me a sweet telescope, 606...

Thanks 606. You sound like you know what you are talkign about. Is it easy to get hold of a cheap entry level telescope that'll enable me to see the kind of detail you can't see with say a decent pair of binoculars?

Skywatcher Explorer 130 seems to get all the best reviews... £132...

I'd say you could do better than Seben by buying something from the Skywatcher range. Which one you go for will depend not only on budget but also on what sort of things you want to be able to see, whether you want something that will track the stars as they drift from east to west, or even go for the computerised "go to" stuff.

A couple of years ago I bought a Celestron Nexstar 8SE and that really takes some beating for London skies - it's a very long focal length Schmidt-Cassegrain scope, meaning it uses a clever corrector lens at the front, then a whacking great 8 inch diameter mirror at the back which bounces the light back up to a little mirror mounted in the middle of the corrector lens, and that secondary mirror bounces the light back out through a hole in the rear end of the scope. If you're really bored of life, I could post some of the shots I've taken through it, using webcams for planets and a DSLR for other stuff like M42 and M13. The faint fuzzy stuff (galaxies etc) are going to be hard to see through London's famous light pollution but this sort of scope (and they come in smaller/cheaper sizes too) is excellent for moon, planets, star clusters etc.

Quite like the look of the Skywatcher Skyhawk 1145P SynScan AZ GOTO... Appears any old numbnuts (like myself) could get this to work and see some good stuff... I need to do more research, I know SFA about optics...

If you're really bored of life, I could post some of the shots I've taken through it, using webcams for planets and a DSLR for other stuff like M42 and M13.

Do it! Seriously though I'd be interested to see the kind of results you'd get in London.

Wow, that's awesome, Paul! Is that bottom pic the ISS? What's the top pic?

Top one is Mars - a 1 minute video sequence taken with an old Philips ToUcam at 640x320 pixels, then stacked and tweaked in a brilliant bit of of freeware called Registax that massively improves the signal to noise ratio and brings out planetary detail really nicely.

Yes, the third one is the ISS, tracked by hand and shot with a Canon 1000D. It was doing about 17,000mph at the time so the shutter speed had to be pretty quick.

Shit the bed - that's amazing!

I really didn't expect that sort of detail. i'm well impressed.

...and this is M27, the glowing remains of a star that exploded long long ago, before LFGSS existed

Orion's Sword, shot through a v cheap skywatcher 4" refractor, which is why the stars are bloated and purple because the optics are not that great

...and this is M27, the glowing remains of a star that exploded long long ago, before LFGSS existed

Pfffff! Are you on drugs? Really impressed with the results you've got, gonna do this... :D

That pic of the ISS is one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time... makes me want to sell my bikes and buy a scope!

Awesome photographs.

In my previous job, I used to polish lenses for telescopes amongst other things, now, I sell beds. Fucking recession.

That ISS picture is brilliant!

Thanks for the kind comments folks. When I'd taken those shots of the ISS I really hadn't expected them to come out at all: I was manhandling the scope with one hand, firing the shutter on the camera with the other, and trying to watch the ISS in the cross-hairs at the same time. Not normally conducive to crisp shots when working at a focal length of over 2 metres. So I could hardly believe my eyes when I checked the shots on the screen on the back of the camera: as I zoomed in on the little white dot, it took shape as a recognisable space station.

I took a few a week or two later:

and some kind soul provided a revised version

It's passing over london again soon - tonight it skims the SSE horizon at about 9.17pm, then tomorrow it's going to get a bit higher in the sky at 9.41pm; then on Friday at 10.05 it will be good and bright and half way up to the zenith. A really good overhead pass is due at 10.30 on Saturday night. I may see if I can grab a few more frames.

I need a telescope... NOW!!!
Would you recommend the set-up in post #31 for a newb, Paul? I'll wanna get a digi-eyepiece/webcam for it too at some point...

astronomy is it Joe, not heard it called that before…

Astronomy is cool, MOC and I went to watch the Leonids from the top of wimbledon common last winter with a flask of tea, I saw two - then it clouded over..bastards.

Paul, those shots are awesome!

I take it with this Celestron you can literally just whack it into the DSLR as if it was an over-elaborate zoom lens.

Joe, for the ISS passes coming up, try to catch it with some bins. That'll wet your appetite.

That was awesome! You almost missed it too, Sam.

I blame the booze. IIRC that was the evening Zed had to attach my rear light to my seat post. My eyes were a little bit fuzzy.

I need a telescope... NOW!!!
Would you recommend the set-up in post #31 for a newb, Paul? I'll wanna get a digi-eyepiece/webcam for it too at some point...

Pretty good, I'd say, for that sort of money. The drawbacks are that its mirror is only 4.5" across, so it only gathers 56% of the light that a 6" mirror would gather, and its focal length is quite short, so it's not going to be that easy to get high magnification views of planets. But the go-to feature is a bargain: I only started using go-to recently and it saves so much time, even for someone who knows their way round the night sky reasonably well. And skywatcher optics have a good reputation these days. And it's nice and portable and will cool down to ambient temps quickly enough. And it's great to be able to punch in "M42" and watch the scope turn round with a humming sound like something out of star wars.