I just got it in the mail last Thursday. It comes with a decent 25mm eyepiece. I bought an extra higher-powered 10mm eyepiece and something called a Barlow lens which doubles the magnification of any eyepiece (at the expense of halving the field of view). From these three things, I now have effectively 25mm, 12.5mm, 10mm, and 5mm focal length eyepieces. The magnification of each of these are 8 40x, 80x, 100x, and 200x, respectively.
Along with these, I bought a moon filter. When you look at the moon through the scope, it can be exceedingly bright. The moon filter reduces that brightness. It's actually two polarized lenses that, when you change their orientation relative to one another, it changes the strength of the filter. This isn't necessary, but it's useful for dealing with different moon phases. They are not solar filters though!
This is a refractor telescope, so it has lenses and no mirrors. It's aperture (diameter of the front lens) is 120mm (4 inches) which is a decent size to see the moon, planets, and the brightest deep sky objects. It's mounted on a Celestron EQ4 equatorial mount, which--once aligned properly with the spin of the Earth--allows you to track stars, planets, and the moon very easily as the Earth rotates under them. It's all very stable, partly because the mount is quite heavy.
Last night, I went out to the parking lot of a local high school. I looked at the moon, Saturn, Vega, and the Ring Nebula. I tried finding the Whirlpool Galaxy, but due to the severe light pollution from the city nearby, my scope couldn't find it. I'm fairly confident I'd be able to see it if I had darker skies somewhere else.
Here's a few pictures I found on the Internet that I think is very representative of what I was able to see through my scope. First, I looked at the moon:
Seeing the moon was extremely easy, and since we had a half moon, the terminator between the light and dark sides created a very similar contrast on the craters as seen in the photo. Very awesome. I could look at it for hours by itself.
Next was Saturn. This is pretty much identical to what I could see in my scope:
The rings were perfectly visible, though in this photograph, you can see what appear to be Saturn's moons. I saw something last night, but I'm not certain it was a moon or not. One thing that my telescope did see that's not as visible in this picture were the Cassini division in the rings, where the rings are thinner in some spots (actually due to the gravitational pull of Saturn's moons, like giant tidal waves rippling through the rings). They were a bit more discernible in my scope last night.
I looked for the Whirlpool galaxy, but I couldn't find it. I suspect it would have looked something like this, if the skies were darker:
After failing to find that, I started looking for the Ring Nebula. After quite a bit of searching, I saw the faintest image of it in my scope. It was so faint, I almost thought it was a reflection of my iris in the eyepiece lens. Here's a picture of almost what it looked like:
After that, I had been out in the parking lot for over two hours, so I packed it in at around 11pm.
No comments:
Post a Comment