Buy a Telescope

And a good one, too!

Its worth the money!!! I saw saturn and could even see its rings with my new telescope. Cant wait to take it out again :)

Got an Orion StarBlast, and have had loads of fun with it. Wish I could get out more often, although with fall approaching, nights will get longer, and I hope to take advantage of them.

Well I didn’t buy Leah brought it for me…(even better!). It’s my birthday today- so she gave it to me as a present. I’m looking forward to putting it together today.

I have a light-polluted location, and so far I have cheap 10×50 binoculars and a cheap photo tripod. So it seems like I should choose something between the total cost of that binocular setup (about $75) and a full-size portable amateur telescope ($1000 to $1500), as an intermediate step. The geometric mean of those two price levels is about $300. Also, I don’t want it to be a Dobsonian, so I can point it below 45 degrees in the sky over railings, cars, etc., instead of having to take it to a perfect hilltop field to use it, and I want it to be very portable and sturdy, worth keeping, not something that’s built on too small a mount.

I’ve already used a cheap 50mm spotting scope and a 3 inch Newtonian and I wasn’t very impressed: Jupiter, Saturn, Pleiades, show’s over. There are telescopes for around $300 that look ugly and wobbly, with computers on them, that can probably point you to a shaky dot and tell you what it is. I want something that’s just reasonable, solid optics, so I can see enough to hunt things down in the sky myself.

The best apparent value I’ve found so far is the Konus Konusky-200, an 8” Newtonian with equatorial motor drive for $499. I don’t know if the mount is stable enough, and it’s a little larger than I wanted, but maybe it would collect enough light that I could use a light pollution filter and see some deep sky objects from here.

I´m thinking in buy a telescope, the main thing is to see the planets with them there are some options here:

-Skywatcher 180 mak, is good on planets but have a lot of cool-down.
-Meade APO 127 5000, good in all purposes but maybe a little expensive in Spain, It will be deleivere din Shops in spring 2007.

-Celestron Nexstar 8 Se with GOTO that is a good thing in my urban sky

-Skywatcher APO 4” good in planets with fast cool-down.

Well there are other options, but the list is so long, because, you know, astronomy is a drug.

i took up astronomy as a hobby this year. it was one of the best things i’ve done in my entire life. you don’t need to be a tech whiz to enjoy astronomy; neither do you need a fancy telescope. a small one – or a pair of binoculars – is enough to see the most dazzling sights.

Well this is more about astronomy and human existance, but you can think about it when you look at the sky with a telescope:

http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/63806/The_Hubble_Deep_Field.html?autoplay=true

Great and really breathtaking video.

I’ve always wanted to see a planet through a telescope! It’s just so beautiful it seems. I’m not really into astronomy or anything like that or astrology. I just really want to look and see a planet or something beautiful in space whenever the nights seem too depressing. It would be awesome.

.. but I am always without money.. I spend a lot of money for go to holidays, for example next week will go to Castiglione della Pescaia and will spend about 1500 Euros… so I never have money to do other things… :(