Have always been interested in astronomy and always watch that show the universe. I am borrowing a friends budget telescope i think it is a Meade 60?

I have a nice mountain top home away from city lights and a great southern view of the stars and am looking for a what would be a good telescope for good viewing of planets, deep space stuff etc.

I do not need portability......it will just stay on the covered concrete porch area and be covered.

I have seen these big 12" Dobosnian scopes and wonder if they are the best bang for the buck if I do not need to have portability. Or is a refractor scope or reflector scope or whatever else better. I would also like to be able to add digital photagraphy later. I'm not looking for high $$$ stuff. Just would be nice to breakout the telescope on a nice evening and let some of my nephew & such look at Saturns rings or Jupitor's spot when they visit. That is if I can get something reasonably priced to do it with. I'm thinking $800-$1200 range with object locator/tracking

 

I think spaceweather dot com has some links to some on their page

 

Try www.oriontelescopes.com. On the bottom right of their home page they have a "Smart Buy Advisor". It will help you decide what type of telescope you need. We have a refractor at home and have really enjoyed it. Ed B

 

Yes a big Dobsonian is the best bang for the buck.

There is a company, Obsession Telescopes, that sells 20", 25" and 36" telescopes. The 20" unit is right under $7000, adding an auto tracking drive will add about another $3000 for a grand total of $10K. Thats expensive but consider that a similar sized Schmidt-Cassegrain would get upwards of $30K!

Personally I started out with a Meade 70mm refractor with Meades Autostar tracking. I paid around $350 or so for it. It was a nice telescope and did help me learn the sky but I really wanted more.

Then I moved to an Orion 8" Reflector with a Dobsonian mount. I paid about $600 at the time for it. It came with Orions encoder driven locator. The locator is a handy device that gives you directions to push the telescope to so that you can see whatever you'd like. If you line it up accurately it will put the object in a low power eye piece very consistently. Its easy to work with but has limitations, after about 3hrs of work you probably will have to line it up again. But again, unless you're really hardcore I doubt your viewing session will make it that far.

Personally I used the locator about 2 or 3 times. I got to know the sky decently well and started printing out free starcharts and starhopped from star to star to find what I was looking for. I saw more and learned more doing it that way anyway.

Comparing between the tiny meade that would go where I wanted and the orion where I had to push it to the larger mirror was a huge difference.

Seeing Jupiter and its moons is easy with binoculars but you can very easily resolve the cloud bands and pick out shadows of transiting moons on Jupiters face.

With the small telescope Mars is just a red pinprick. With the 8" Mars has rough shades of red, features and polar ice caps.

For Venus either will do you fine as all you can see is its phases. Actually this is where the little autotracking scope does better as you can find Venus during the day (that was its only real advantage).

With Saturn the little scope just shows a yellow planet and some rings. With the 8" I can make out the Cassini Division on a night with good seeing. Titan is also easy to pick out as well as some other smaller moons. I made out 5 moons in total one night!

I've easily viewed Uranus and Neptune as well. Never saw Pluto with either as it can't be resolved with either of these scopes. Observing Pluto with just about anything besides Hubble is more of a task than you would think. Most times all you can do is take a picture of a star field one night and take a picture of the same field again a night or two later and look for what moved!

So in summary get as much aperture as you can afford. All those bells and whistles such as autotracking are nice but in the end aperture is what you want!


Now, you may ask, just how did I know what moons I was looking at or even if I was looking at Saturns moons? Well that actually was easy. Get you a copy of Starry Night. http://www.starrynightstore.com/ Its worth every penny. You enter in your time and find your location and Starry Night will allow you to time most things within a fraction of a second plus or minus some 50,000 years! Its a very powerful program. If you keep it updated you can track variable stuff like the ISS accurately too.

All I did when I was looking at Saturn or any of the other objects was to draw a picture on a 3x5 card and note the time. When I came back in from observing I just rolled Starry Night back to the correct time and zoomed in on Saturn. Everything was laid out just where it was supposed to be (although upside down and reversed, but hey theres no UP in space!)

If your set on long exposure astrophotography then a Dobsonian mount isn't the best choice. With that you would need something with an equatorial mount or at least a guided Alt-Az mount with a correcting ring. For the price range your talking about you can get a 12" Dobsonian reflector with the manual object locator or a 8" autotracking Schmidt-Cassegrain.

Hope this helped!

 

Hey DaveB I want to come over to your place sometime to do some star gazing. Very informative post!!

 

DaveB.inVa
Thank you for your very informative post. We each have our hobbies and areas of expertise and I really appreciate you input.

When I first started looking through this inexpensive scope I have been using. I thought how in the heck did all those guys back in the 16th & 17th century find anything with the scopes they had. I would have thought even the scope I was using would be on par with what they had. I think i'm wrong....I can't see squat.

I will need to step up for sure.

 

I dont know much about it, but hope to learn more this summer. I just got the contract to restore the Washburn Observatory building in Madison WI. One of the oldest in the country (1878 i think ) Will be cool to see how it all works. I was there during the pre-con activities, the telescope is all brass , from sight to the large end, has to be 15-20'. Im sure its antient technology but still pretty cool.

 

That would be a fun and interesting project to be on.