| Getting Started |
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Introduction
It hits you from out of nowhere..."I want to buy a telescope!" Many questions follow. What sort of telescope? How much do I need to spend? How serious am I? What am I going to do with it, just look or take photo's? What will I see?
You have just opened yourself up to the whole universe. Astronomy is such a rich and interesting hobby you will be hooked for life! It will open up your mind to science, theology and awareness of the big picture.
So what are the next steps to take? Where do you go from here?
Know your sky first
As often as possible, you must get out under the night sky! This is the only way to learn it. Look for prominent stars and patterns. Note where certain stars are at certain times. You will quickly see how the sky moves through the night, week, month and year. Seeing this will give you a real sense of where you are in the solar system. You will notice things like planets and the moon and the line they all seem to follow. Like runners in their lanes on a circular track, viewed from the side, the planets seem to catch up to each other, lap each other, stop and even seem to go backwards at times. See how the milky way rotates through the night as well, and how you can view different sections of it as the year progresses.
A star chart or wheel (planisphere) is an inexpensive way to learn the sky. These are available in retail shops and can also be found on the internet. Start simple. Find major constellation (easily recognisable one). Some constellations are hard to identify and visualise. All you need to do here is find one that you do recognise. Find it on your chart and find it in the sky. Turn your chart to face the same way. Some people turn their street directory when they turn a corner and change direction. It is a good way to get your bearings. Once you are familiar with the sky, you won't need to rotate your chart.
Getting to know the sky with the naked eye is also a great start, because it will help you later when you want to locate faint and distant objects using binoculars or a telescope. You will appreciate what you see far more when you do.
Reference books and sites
Make sure you buy up to date books. Pictures are fine and helpful but make sure the information is detailed and up-to-date! Don't worry too much if you can't grasp a lot of the stuff in the books at first. You will learn a lot from them and grow into them. There's nothing worse than buying astronomy for dummies and finding that you learn the book in a day. I recommend a good star-hopping guide at least.
There are online star catalogues like:
Shop around on the net. You don't have to pay full price in a shop for a paper dust cover that is not torn. You will probably get it wet, dirty and all sorts in your first night outside anyway. I also got a lot of good info from news agency magazines. Go and have a browse there too.
Cold nights
Nothing kills interest more than discomfort. If you freeze your bottom off, then chances are, you will not enjoy yourself and neither will anyone with you. You and they will be far less inclined to come back to it and learn more next time. Remember to rug up in layers. If you are going long distance to get away from city lights, take as many comforts with you as you can lay your hands on. A thermos flask full of hot chocolate, coffee or soup makes a world of difference and partaking in it only adds to the pleasant experience. Some background music coming from your car (quietly) can also provide a bit of a social atmosphere. Don't light a fire though, as looking at it will ruin your night vision. DO NOT TAKE ALCOHOL! Alcohol seriously affects your vision when it comes to astronomy. Some very faint objects viewed through a telescope are hard enough to see with normal vision. Besides, chances are that you drove to your viewing site.
Best conditions
Ideal observing conditions are as follows:
Spontaneity
Sometimes you can plan to view a celestial event. My luck has been that if there is something special happening up there, it's overcast. Phooey! Get out there on the spur of the moment. If you look up and say, "Wow! What a beautiful clear and dark sky!" Then get your gear out and go for it! Encourage your friends to do the same. Spontaneity is a wonderful thing!
Dark adaptation
When you go out into the dark, you will notice that you won't be able to see very well. As time passes, you will begin to notice things around you. Features on the ground, the chair you tripped over earlier and more stars than you could see at first. It takes the average person 5 minutes to see better, but 30 minutes to fully adapt to the dark. Avoid trying to show others through the eyepiece of the telescope until they have become adapted. They will see nothing and be disappointed. If you need light, use a red filter and make it as dim as is needed to get the job done.
Binoculars
Binoculars are an astronomers best friend. I wish I had some. I broke my last set. You will often see numbers like 7x50 written on binoculars. The first number represents the magnification while the second number is a size of the aperture in millimeters. Aperture means “opening” (also known as objective lens) and is where light enters the binocular.
The bigger the objective lens, (aperture), the more light it can let in and gather. Your eye's pupil will dilate only so much, so 7 millimeters for the eyepiece lens is usually plenty. For maximum effective light-gathering and brightest image, the exit pupil should equal the diameter of the fully dilated human eye—about 7 mm, reducing with age. Light gathered by a larger exit pupil is wasted. Good quality optics is what is needed here. Keep your budget in mind but don't skimp if you don't have to or you may regret not spending the extra few dollars. Telescopes
As I am really no expert on the subject, I can only offer you my own experiences as I see them. I had little or no help from anyone as far as advice or instruction was concerned, so I have mostly learned astronomy on my own through the internet, books and field experience with my own 'scopes.
I started back in 2000 on an impulse at a retail shop that sold cheap telescopes. I had a spare couple of weeks pay ($1000) so I thought, "What the heck? I've always been interested, a sci-fi fan and always wondered in awe at space documentaries. I bought the most expensive one in the shop at the time which just happened to be $1000 with the added bonus that it had simple motor drives. It was a 4 inch Newtonian reflector with very cheap optics and eyepieces. Of course, I didn't have the luxury of the internet to research my purchase before-hand because if I did, I would not have wasted my money. It wasn't a complete waste of time though. The telescope was good enough to give me a taste, especially after finding Saturn by fluke, and seeing the Orion nebula and Jupiter. That same year we had a lunar eclipse in Sydney which was awesome to watch through a telescope.
A word of warning! Don't believe the pictures on the side of the telescope's packaging are what you are going to see. You will be extremely disappointed and so will any teenager that you buy it for as a gift. I say teenager because every time I have been in a telescope shop, I hear some customer asking the sales people what is a good scope to buy their teenager for Christmas. If you want to buy for anyone else, first take them to an astronomy venue and give them a look through a real telescope. This will give you a gauge of their interest and may save you a lot of money or the possibility of buying a piece of future junk!
On the other hand, sometimes it is good to buy an inferior telescope, just to teach you that it never pays to skimp in this field. It may also save you from spending BIG dollars if you find that astronomy is really not your passion. If you do find that stargazing is going to be a long-time pursuit and if you can afford to blow all you have, my advice is, DO IT!
A couple of years of enduring the smaller scope saw me coming back from an overseas work trip, all cashed up from tax-free earnings. I spent what I had and purchased a large aperture, fully computerised, motor driven and GPS aligned Schmidt-Cassegrain( Below centre image). Oh my Lord! What a wonderful bit of kit it was! I couldn't wait to get it out of the box and set it up! Just to see it in all it's glory in the middle of my lounge room. Using it for the first time was a little bit daunting, but most computerised telescopes have manuals with them that give you enough info to get them fired up. Before I knew it, I found that the telescope was actually teaching me the sky! Sometimes charts don't help if you have no basis to start from. Just going to one star party of guided tour will be invaluable in getting you started. I didn't have that luxury so it was good for me that the telescope had such a database to not only show me named stars and objects, but heir locations, distances and sizes! Well worth the money invested.
This I know, the bigger the aperture, the better. Electronics are great but like the average TV and DVD player, they can do a lot more than you probably will care to learn to start with. I spent a few years getting to know mine better and still didn't know it's systems back to front when I sold it. In that regard it never bored me and I kept on learning. Dobsonians (Below right image), are great for their user friendly simplicity and range of HUGE apertures. Now I can speak for refractor telescopes, (Below left image), because now I haven't owned and used used two. Smaller aperture, but magnificent crisp and sharp views if you get the good glass and coatings.
I initially chose the 11 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain because of its compact portability. Living in light-polluted Sydney forced me to drive long-distance for observing under decent skies. If I was thinking of building my own observatory then, as I am now, I may have chosen a different telescope. This one eventually did well in a permanent setup anyway.
If you are a bit of a tinkerer and you love to play with technical stuff, then have a look at all the things you can attach to a telescope. PC interface, CCD camera's, video cameras are just a few and there is no end of new and better technology to add to your ensemble.
Eyepieces and filters
There are a large number of filter and eyepiece combinations for both visual observing enhancement and astrophotography. Some filters improve contrast between light and dark so that features stand out in greater detail. Others filter out such things as ambient or even dangerous light. Solar filters are available to filter out dangerous light that is capable of damaging your eyes permanently and can also destroy your telescope's optics in no time at all. Take time to read up all about SAFETY before viewing the sun!! More on that down the page.
Laser pointers
These are excellent tools for illustrating the sky to others. When you point with your finger, everyone has to line up at your shoulder and take turns looking along your arm and then you still can't be sure they are looking at the star you are indicating. The laser pointer takes all the guesswork out of it. All you will hear is "OOOH, AAHH, OH SO THAT'S WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE!" I highly recommend you purchase one of these. Make sure you get a proper astronomy green laser, not a cheap red one. There is NO comparison. Be wary of people's eyes, don't shine it at passing cars or aircraft and try to avoid using it at astronomy gatherings where there are other telescope users nearby.
Astrophotography
There are so many books and internet resources on astrophotography, that I hardly know where to begin. Take a good look around and if you can, try before you buy. I started with a manual SLR, but I found that it's ground screen, (focus screen) was so course, that it made already faint objects in the eyepiece, impossible to see in the viewfinder and focus on. In most cases, I couldn't even see if the object was even in the field of view. Try to buy a camera with a very fine focus screen. If you go digital SLR, I am told that is the way to go. Next step is CCD cameras. This sort of advanced photography can be very complicated and expensive, but they are versatile and turn out some stunning images. Combine these with photo enhancement software, and you can do a lot with the images. A CCD chip can be more than twenty times more light sensitive than photographic film, allowing for greatly reduced exposure times and greater detail.
The moon
Viewing the moon will temporarily ruin your night vision, so keep that in mind when you choose to view it. There are filters available for your eyepieces that can reduce the glare and can improve the contrast and detail. If you do want to view the moon through a telescope, then a moon with a shadow on it, i.e. three quarter or less, is best. The shadow line is called the terminator and it gives excellent contrast between light and dark, showing crater walls and shadows of all large features. You will observe much better detail along this line. If you are moving into astrophotography, the moon is an excellent target to try your first few practice photos on.
Deep-space objects
Deep space objects like nebula and other galaxies are challenging targets for the beginner. Not only finding them, but focusing on such small and dim objects can be difficult. I can tell you though, that when you do find them it is amazing! Once you have located them, it's usually not hard to find them again. Most of my favourites I have viewed so often, I don't need to use co-ordinates anymore to find them, I just point the telescope in that direction and find them by eye. I have had the advantage that my second telescope was computerised and GPS aligned, so the telescope taught me how to find everything first!
If you can afford it, buy a good deep space catalogue. Get one with charts and photographs, so you know where to look and what you are supposed to be looking at. Most of them will have object Messier numbers, Caldwell or NGC numbers included. These come in handy when using computerised equipment because you can just punch in the number on your telescope, and it will find it automatically and track it.
Comets
The one time I chased a comet, I drove 3 hours after work, out to a felled pine forest near Bathurst, west of Sydney. Comet Machholz proved to be a worthy target for a first timer, so when I popped out from under the eastern seaboard's cloud cover, I set up and waited for dark. I had been tracking the comet in the night sky from Sydney for about a week, determining it's path past the Pleiades. Not much to look at in the light pollution for the western suburbs, but once away from the city, It was awesome. Keep your eye on the astronomy websites for the latest on comet predictions.
Meteor showers
I haven't had much luck with meteor showers yet. There are meteor showers all the time, nearly every month. I think the most famous is the Leonids. Meteors are usually trails of debris particles following a comet's path. On a regular basis, as these comets pass through the solar system, earth will pass through the trail. As the various size particles enter the atmosphere, they build up a high pressure air pocket in front of them. Like the pressurised air in the end of a bike pump, the air gets hot. Hot enough to bring the debris to such high temperatures, they can glow, melt, burn out or even explode in a shower of smaller burning particles like a gravel stone in a hot campfire.
Meteor showers are usually located by giving you what's called the radiant. If you see a few streaks in the sky through the night and remember the directions they were traveling, you might think that they are going in all different directions. In actual fact, you should notice that they all can be traced back along their trail, to a central point. This is the radiant. Try to imagine a hose pointed at you, set on spray. As you look at the hose and pass through the stream, you will see all the water droplets passing you by, fanning out around you from their originating stream, namely the hose.
You can film meteor showers with a video camera or a web camera. You can be lucky through a telescope, but it is best to use a camera on a tripod. Use a wide angle lens, point the field of view at the radiant and set the exposure for the desired time. If you are in a light polluted area, then this exposure time should be as short as possible or the film will wash out. As soon as you see a meteor flash in front of the camera, close the shutter and set it again for another one. This method also works well on lightning. For example; open shutter for 20 seconds, if there is a flash of lightning during that time, close the shutter immediately, then open the shutter for the next 20 seconds or lightning flash, whichever comes first. Happy hunting!
Solar observing
Solar observing can be very dangerous! Pay respect to all warnings in this regard! You can cook your instruments and destroy your own eyes. If you do the latter, say goodbye to astronomy, watching a good movie and life as you know it in general. Your sight is so precious!
The two types of filters I have experience with, provide very different viewing.
The standard solar filter looks like tin foil, and covers the front aperture of your telescope, camera or binoculars. I paid about $60 au from a telescope shop in Sydney for an A4 size sheet. I cut an off-axis hole in the cover of the telescope and pasted it over the hole. (See photos below of front and back of cover). You can buy a pre-fabricated off-axis cover with filter or full aperture. The sun is made of different layers. This filter takes out about 99.9% of the harmful light, allowing you to view the photosphere, which is the sun in visible light and natural colour, (white, image below left.) You can easily see sunspots, the magnetic anomalies where the magnetic fields interact with the surface, cooling it by around 1000 degrees. Surface temperature is approximately 6000 degrees Celsius.
The hydrogen Alpha filter, allows you to view the chromosphere. This layer is above the photosphere and is also hotter than the inner layer. (Below centre images). Ha filters are extremely expensive but worth it if you look after them. You will see far greater detail and stunning features, not visible with a standard filter. Ha filters are also on my wish list.
Satellites
Just before dawn and just after dusk is the best time to view satellites. The ground you are standing on is in the earths shadow, while the satellite is high enough to be in sunlight. There are hundreds of satellites up there but my favourite is the International Space Station. When that baby goes over, you can't miss it! I find it a very profound moment, looking at that bright light passing overhead in space, knowing that there is a full time crew aboard. What a job! A site on the internet called Heavens Above, http://www.heavens-above.com/ has some very good info and real time data on what's up , when and where to look.
Once, while looking at the moon through my telescope, I saw a satellite as a white light move into the field of view then change to a detailed black silhouette against the white moon backdrop, It was and amazing sight and I wish I had the camera on at that moment.
Sharing your passion
Remember that while you may love and obsess over your new hobby, most other people have limited interest in the subject. When sharing the experience, try to gage your audience fairly. People can get bored with it very easily. Keep the info informative and not too complicated, but don't insult their intelligence. Make it fun for everyone, especially the kids. Answer everyone's questions as best and truthfully that you can. Separate fact from theory. If you don't know something, its really nice to say "I don't know, but if you really want to find out, come and see me later and we can try to find out." If you want a more professional presentation, rehearse it first. Write down a logical sequence of information, like starting in the middle or the solar system, and working your way out. Start at the beginning of the created universe, and travel through to now.
I hope my experiences and advice is helpful and I welcome you to the universe! It's hard to look at all there is up there and not wonder who designed it. It's so amazingly complicated, yet so beautifully simple! May you have clear and dark skies on your observing nights, after all, we do need rain sometimes!
God bless you,
Barry :)
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