scorzon t1_iuco4d9 wrote on October 30, 2022 at 9:27 AM

Fantastic images, much appreciated.

As an astronomically interested (though completely unknowledgeable) engineer from a totally different field, what is the process you use to locate, zoom and then track a body that moves across our night sky so rapidly. At that distance doesn't it move across your field of view very quickly?

Apologies if that is a really dopey question, but I'm old enough now to not care what people think of me 😁

J3RRYLIKESCHEESE OP t1_iue9xnn wrote on October 30, 2022 at 5:52 PM

Hey thank you for the comment.

Most of the planets are bright and visible to the naked eye, there are websites/apps like Stellarium that show where they are in the sky so that helps locate them. My telescope is motorized so it tracks and points to the object automatically as it moves across the sky when the telescope is properly aligned.

The telescope I use is a newtownian, which uses 2 mirrors, a concave primary mirror and a flat secondary mirror. Then you can insert barlow lenses into the focuser barrel to increase the focal length, this way you can zoom :)

scorzon t1_iuejth6 wrote on October 30, 2022 at 6:57 PM

Excellent, thank you. I suspected it would need to be automatic of course, I remember as a young lad with a basic as beans "my first refractor telescope" trying to keep up manually with the moon. My first and only telescope. If I lived in a properly dark skies area of England I'd think about getting another, 40 years later, it's just mind blowing what you can see.

Do you mind me asking what kind of ball park cost we'd be talking for a setup like yours. No probs if you'd rather not say.

FatiTankEris t1_iugmvxu wrote on October 31, 2022 at 4:17 AM

I looked up, and it seems to be around $2500 or so... But it depends on where you buy, and if there are used parts.

scorzon t1_iuh6tri wrote on October 31, 2022 at 9:00 AM

Cheers, I got excited when I saw the notification for your reply on my phone, as it truncated that figure to $250 😁

Still $2500 seems very reasonable and these days would be some £2500 I expect. I just need another £250,000 on top of that to afford the upgrade to a house in a dark skies part of the country 🥴

FatiTankEris t1_iuhb6u6 wrote on October 31, 2022 at 10:06 AM

Well, at least planets don't need dark skies. Can be seen during daytime.

scorzon t1_iuhmvpg wrote on October 31, 2022 at 12:22 PM

Now see that's what I mean, I'm interested but without any domain knowledge. Of course you don't need amazingly dark skies for the planets, that never occurred to me. Thanks for the steer.

Out of interest what would the OP likely see with that kind of setup when training the lens on some nearby stars. Other than our own sun of course 🤭

FatiTankEris t1_iuj5ig8 wrote on October 31, 2022 at 6:50 PM

That depends on what's sensing the light at the end, your eyes or a camera. If the eyes, then it would look like the night sky, but with stars everywhere. Nebulas would look like grey clouds in the stars. One has to remember that they'll always be pinpoints though, because they're too far away, but some multi-starsystems might resolve separation between stars. If you're using a camera, then what can be seen is increased a lot, an exposure of 2 seconds can reveal colour too. But the sky is moving from our view as our Earth rotates, and under magnification, that's faster and trails out exposures, so a counter-rotating mount with a motor becomes required. It allows the view to remain perfectly still and to take longer exposures of the stars, allowing much deeper views with colours. Such a big telescope usually can't fit on consumer Equatorial mounts like that (10" is quite huge), but a 6" can. Usually smaller telescopes with better mounts are used for DSOs (Deep-Sky Objects). Best is to look on r/astrophotography and r/telescopes (there's a pinned buyer's guide), there you'd see many impressive Deep-Sky Objects captured on even smaller telescopes, about 3", their price usually comes from the EQ motorized mount and camera. A great starter is an 8" reflector dobsonian. The larger the aperture, the greater the resolution and light collection. That's a balance of size and power, so to speak. Planets require large aperture, but no motorization, DSOs require a motor-Mount, but can be shot on smaller optics as well.