Entry-Level Astronomy? 358
brobak writes "I'm getting ready to move into a new home on a couple of acres of rural property a significant distance from any large source of light pollution. I've always been interested in astronomy in general, and I would like to put my dark skies to use by picking up decent telescope and learning a bit about the skies over my head. The overall budget for this project is going to be around $1,000. I am particularly interested in astrophotography, but I understand that that may carry me outside the scope of the initial budget. I've already signed up for my local astronomy club's next monthly meeting. I have been doing Web research, but I thought that the Slashdot community would be the perfect place to get opinions on entry-level equipment, websites, and books."
How dark is it? (Score:2, Insightful)
Go slow (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:get an Apochromatic Refractor (Score:5, Insightful)
Aperture is king. Aperture wins. You can never get enough aperture
My advice is to forget about astrophotography for the moment. Do not get a DSLR camera -- you will want a dedicated astro-camera with a cooled CCD sensor. You will also want a good equatorial mount (Losmandy, Astro-physics, or similar) which will cost at least ~$2000. Deep-sky astrophotography is expensive and for the moment, you're better served with a good visual instrument to get you started. (If you just want to take images of the moon and planets, you can get by with a webcam and a lower cost equatorial mount.)
With a $1k budget, you won't be able to do deep-sky astrophotography. Given your budget, the economics of astro-imaging, and the difficulty of putting a large telescope on a quality equatorial mount, your best bet is to forego imaging until you can save a substantially larger amount of money. In the meantime, get yourself a 10" or larger Dobsonian-mounted Newtonian. They may look cheap, but you will appreciate the aperture when viewing deep-sky objects.
Oh, and join a local astronomy club if you can.
Low Buck, High Yeild (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're serious about the stargazing, forget the pricey glass. Get a decent set of binoculars and a few good books, and one of those plastic "Star Wheel" sky charts.
For the binocs, a basic pair of 10x70's will set you back a hundred and fifty bucks or so online. For the books, try Astronomy for Dummies and Left Turn at Orion. Also, your library will have back issues of Sky and Telescope - read 'em, and then visit their site. [skyandtelescope.com] They have star maps you can print out that shows what's worth looking at each month. Try not to be too put out by their over-agressive marketeering.
The learning curve will be steeper than a big-bucks robotic "Goto Scope" that aims and focuses for you, but with a nice lawn chair, some decent binoculars and a rough understanding of what you're pointing them at, a night under the stars won't fail to deliver a few thrills.
Once that gets old, then look into the big-money glass. Telescopes, on their own, are a pretty damn rewarding hobby, especially once you get into making and modding them yourself. But unless you really, really know what you're after, dropping a grand on glass isn't a good idea. It likely won't be anywhere near what you want once you understand what that is.
Start small... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Best advice I got (Score:5, Insightful)
I SECOND THIS. I can not say it strong enough. This is THE most important advice for someone just getting in to astronomy. So many people as they are buying their first telescope take the wrong road.
There are 3 roads to take here.
Road 1: It's only $129 and it magnifies 8000 TIMES. - The trap is that the optics are junk in it.
Road 2: I will see more deep sky stuff with a 10 inch dob, or a 12 inch SC. - The trap is that it sits in the basement, unused. It is too much of a pain to just get out on a wonderful night, so it sits. This is the advice the poster above was giving you.
Road 3: A nice middle of the road scope that fits your budget and you use all the time to learn the sky and see things that are amazing.
As others have said, the astrophotography aspect of it is really going to be above your budget. Sure, you can get the "webcam converted to a starscope", but it is junk. Stay within your budget, and get a nice scope for yourself. One that you can get outside at the drop of a hat. Not something that becomes an anchor.
Let me quote him again:
The best advice I got (now in retrospective) when starting out was to buy an telescope that was easy to take out and setup, the best scope is the scope you use often.
That was the best advice I got as well. The best one is the one you will use. I guess that means smaller is better in this case.
Go to your meeting first (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Astronomy software (Score:3, Insightful)
Have realistic expectations: You'll NEVER take Hubble-like pictures and there are very few things (outside of our atmosphere) that you'll see any color from with your eye. Photography offers a better change to capture color.
Learn about stacking multiple exposures: see Photoshop or applications like AStroStack
Spend the extra money on a good tripod and mount as you'll really wish you did when you start shooting longer exposures (because stacking isn't cutting it and now you want to stack long-exposures)
Don't waste your money on a red flash light. Red light is needed to help keep your eyes acclimated to the darkness. Red cellophane over a regular flashlight works. LEDs are the best as they have long battery life.
Allow the telescope to adjust temperature for several hours.
Know your equipment. This will some with time AND USE.
Know this sky. This will come with time and use.
Remember that you spent all that money to enjoy the wonders of the universe. Don't get pissed or let down.
Good luck on keeping mosquitoes away.
Re:Budget too small (Score:3, Insightful)
For planetary images, you can do pretty well with short exposures and using align/stack software. By short, I mean 1/30 to 1/2 second. This will get you pictures of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
For deep-sky stuff, you need to have much longer exposures, and you will often want a narrow field of view. For this, you will definitely need accurate RA tracking and a very accurate polar alignment. I have worked with up to 30 second exposures; this takes quite a bit of patience with a manual polar alignment.
Really wide field photos with a digital camera and no telescope is a lot easier to do, but most regular digital cameras aren't that sensitive (lots of noise in long exposures).
The equipment I have: 6" Matsukov-Cassegrain, Meade DSI color camera, plus an $800 mount (I forget the brand). This ran about $2.4K total.
I guess my main point would be that astophotography requires quite a bit of patience, and does not produce the kind of pictures you see in magazines without a lot of extra work and a lot of really expensive equipment. I didn't start out on this path right away and wouldn't recommend it unless you have a lot of money to spend.
Another way to look at it is everything I say here is wrong if you throw enough money at it!
Re:I went through the same thing (Score:3, Insightful)
Or he can buy some cheap piece of junk mount and try to do astro-photography for ~ $1k and be very disappointed.
My biggest piece of advice to the newby: Green laser pointer, you can see the beam. Mount it to your telescope, I built a mount of wood (drilled 3 holes, glued on two rare-earth magnets from think-geek, it took 10 minutes) or you can buy a $100 setup, but any way you cut it the green laser pointer will help you locate things in scope much, much faster. You simply aim the "canon" by pointing the laser at the spot in the sky you want to see. Other accessories very useful for the newb: right-angle corrected finder, laser collimator (get the "deluxe" [telescope.com] so you can align your primary with the barlowed-laser approach)
Get a barlow so you can use the barlowed laser approach to colimate your primary, it makes it dead-simple. The Barlow of course also can be used to double the "power" of all your eyepieces so you need less glass to get going (good glass [telescope.com] is very expensive)
Pay the $12 so you can shop at Astromart [astromart.com], you can pick up most everything 30-50% off there.
You already joined your astronomy club, this is good, Cloudy Nights [cloudynights.com] is a great resource too, the people in the beginners forum are extremely friendly and helpful. The one CloudyNights star party I went to (Buck-Eye-On-The-Sky) this summer was a great place to learn from the masters and it was a lot of fun too.
Stelarrium [stellarium.org] rocks, there are a lot of other programs that work too, but Stellarium is dead-simple to use, perfect for the beginner, OSS, free, and it runs on anything with any 3d card.
Most importantly, Have fun! Seriously though download Stellarium onto your laptop. Take it and any pair of binoculars you can find and go out tonight about an hour after dark. Look to the south for the "teapot" that is Sagittarius, the center of our galaxy. It is just exploding with star-clusters and is a delight through binoculars, and Stellarium will guide you through what there is to see in it. If that doesn't do it for you, then a telescope isn't gonna help ;-)
Re:Good binoculars, star charts, and a red flashli (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus, a nice 10 inch dob gives bright images, it's a quality instrument, you can get fancy electronic setting circles, and they don't cost much at all.
Besides, when a kid says he wants a telescope, he wants a telescope! Not binoculars, but something that looks like a telescope.
At the end of the day, M-43 in binoculars is NOTHING compared to M-43 in a 10 inch Dobsonian scope with a quality eyepiece. Images and experiences like that are what make astronomers out of wide-eyed kids. Binoculars are for the birds (watchers).
Re:Astronomy software & Photography (Score:3, Insightful)
I use Astroplanner for all of my observing and planning. It will draw the stars as they appear in the eyepieces of you telescope, so you can compare and make sure you are looking at what you think you are looking.
It mentions pointing and clicking an item in the manual and then clicking Go to drive your mount to the object. This drive to an object, is it then tracking the object, or is it a one shot to there while waiting the next Go as the star drifts out of view?
Can you answer this? Are you using it with a motorized mount?