A.R.S.E.

I posted 4 years ago (!) about the little 5" telescope I bought and how cool astronomy is for little kids:

http://www.arseforums.com/phpBB/viewtop ... pe#p328248

Well, to further support my eldest daughter's burgeoning interest in science, we upgraded to a new 8" telescope on the weekend. And in that intervening period, there have been quite amazing advances in telescope usability. With our original telescope, the process was entirely steam-driven. You started with a star map, or some knowledge of the night sky, jumped from star to star to try to get to what you wanted to look at (ie starting at B-Crux, go south-east 1 degree etc), often leaving you uncertain if you are in the right part of the sky at all, manually aligned the scope so the little red dot finder scope on the side points at the target, then look through the eyepiece to further align, and if you bump the scope even a tiny bit you might have to spend ages reacquiring the star or planet. That said, it did teach you the night sky, though it was tedious if you just wanted to quickly look at something.

Well, the new scope we got at the weekend is a Celestron Nexstar Evolution which you can control from an ipad or android phone, and which will go straight to anything in the night sky and track it!

It has its own wifi source which you connect to via its app. From the phone it gets your exact location and time, then you point the scope at up to three stars you can see (you don't even have to know what they are) and it aligns the exact position of the scope with the current night sky. Then its simply a matter of selecting the star or planet you want to see and the scope magically whirs into position, so its right there in the eyepiece. Its bloody revolutionary!

The other cool thing about this scope is it has a built-in battery to run the GoTo motor. In other GoTo scopes, where you can usually enter the coordinates of a start or planet into an attached controller, power is provided externally, so people have to carry big battery packs, or jury-rig car batteries and the like to run these things out in the field. You can charge this one at home and then it will run for 10 hours before needing another charge.

We picked this up on Saturday and that evening it was nice and clear. Ava aligned it using her tablet (controlling the scope using arrow keys on the screen), selected Saturn and bang, there it was in the eyepiece. In a couple of hours we moved around the sky looking at clusters, double stars and Mars. Such an amazing device and about the best use of wifi and android connectivity I've seen.

Ruby liked the giant box to play in...

It's always the same. Something comes in a nice big box, it's a better toy for longer than any expensive crap.

Oh, nice telescope, by the way

Looks awesome.

Excellent!! Awesome way to keep the kids into science.

Is the motor stepping? I've been interested in getting something for photography. But the tracking needs to be nice and smooth. Even the smallest steps would make the shots un-sharp. Telescopes are something i'd like to learn more about.

Nice, I've been thinking about getting something like that myself for a while. It's rare that we get clear skies so justifying one is becoming increasingly harder.

Enjoy, great to see the younger generation taking such an interest.

Bring it to Currarong smiss.

Even with the $200 shitter I have I have had a ball.

That's a very sweet new piece of kit.

I have wanted something like that forever... mind if I ask what that setup cost?

I was looking to get a telescope but I think I will buy these

http://www.ozscopes.com.au/celestron-sk ... ulars.html

Seems a good way to start out for me.

Yep, binos are pretty good - we've been using some big binos on a tripod for a while and they be great for some clusters and things.

The scope we bought was $3K Montey...

Number of phone apps that you can use that gives you a quick ball park to start with then fine tune..

Tech has come a long way indeed.

DexterPunk wrote:Excellent!! Awesome way to keep the kids into science.

Is the motor stepping? I've been interested in getting something for photography. But the tracking needs to be nice and smooth. Even the smallest steps would make the shots un-sharp. Telescopes are something i'd like to learn more about.

Not sure of the technical details, but you can fit a camera to the scope and the accuracy and smoothness of tracking allows incredibly detailed astro-photography. More info in general here: http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/foru ... y.php?f=46

smith

Legend. Thanks!

Most awesome =)

I got my Celestron binoculars today and tried them just after sunset. They are great but I need a much better tripod. The darker it got the better they worked so need to go back out and play.

I think they might be my start point for bigger thins to come in time

Wow I am amazed at the clusters of stars that are just out of view with the naked eye. These are great!

Have you tried to look at the ISS?
http://spotthestation.nasa.gov/

It's too fast for me to track. I have seen it go over and it's moving fast. When I was looking at Venus last night just on dusk, a Qantas jet went under it and I had a hard time following it.

Yes, ISS is way too fast - like a jet plane. It's a pretty good naked eye object though. A big, bright light zooming across. The kids love to see it and think of the people up there.

Dr. Pain wrote:Wow I am amazed at the clusters of stars that are just out of view with the naked eye. These are great!

Cool Doc - congrats! My favourite cluster to look at through binoculars is the Jewel Box - so pretty and easy to find in the Southern Cross.

http://www.southastrodel.com/Page002.htm

http://www.shoalhavenastronomers.asn.au ... ions/crux/

This looks like it might be good: http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observin ... g-catalog/

I have a book at home that is aimed at stargazing with binos - when I get back from Brisbane I'll add the name.

smith

Reminds me of this..

Thanks Smith. I was amazed to find clusters last night so I will look at Crux on the next clear night we get here.

After a postponement last month because of flooding, we took our telescope out to Galwary, near Parkes for a long weekend, to do some stargazing at a nice, dark place. Last month’s trip was planned around the dark of the moon, so shifting it meant adding a month, so the moon wouldn’t be blazing away.

Finding a ‘dark’ site in reach of Sydney is pretty tricky – here’s a website that grades light pollution: http://darksitefinder.com/maps/world.html

Only downside of last weekend is that planets like Saturn, and the Milky Way itself, set pretty early this time of year. So this means having to get an early start, because while usually the sky is plenty dark by 10.00 pm or 10.30 pm, to see some things we have to be looking when the conditions aren’t yet great.

However, it was a pretty great weekend. The weather forecast wasn’t looking all that good, but Friday night was pretty clear, with a little cloud, but Saturday night was great – clear as a bell.

We got a good view of Saturn really early in the evening (its close to Venus this time of year, so sets early), and clearly able to see the rings, and some of its moons. I put my phone camera up to the eyepiece to snap this photo – blurry as, but cool to get an image form a crappy setup like this.

Another standout was 47 Tucanae, a globular cluster of millions of stars, that looks like a handful of sand poured out. Amazing.

It was also cool to see the Milky Way in all its glory (one of the objectives of the trip was to show the kids the stars properly – so many people never see the Milky Way because of light pollution – apparently one-third of the world’s population live in very light-polluted places) and to see the Magellanic Clouds with the naked eye. These are small galaxies that are orbiting around our galaxy, 160,000 to 200,000 light years away. Amazing that we can see actual galaxies in our sky. They really do look like clouds. Not much chop in a telescope because they are so big.

I managed to take a couple of photos with my point & shoot camera, with manual settings. Using a 60-second shutter speed was probably too long – it’s surprising how much the stars move in a minute, changing form dots to little lines. Still, pretty happy I could capture these with just a cheap camera on a tripod.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellanic_Clouds

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/47_Tucanae

Awesome Smith.. They are rippers!

awesome stuff

So.. question.. if you program your scope to aim at something, does it then continuously track that object?


Semi Related, Miss V and I went on an overnight work field trip last week to the Flinders Ranges in the mid North of S.A. We were lucky with the weather and had a clear night, so the stars were spectacular

I took a couple of shots with my K1. First one is a 5 minute exposure, and the second is a 1 minute exposure. Hopefully Flickr hasn't murdered the quality too much.


Rawnsley Park - Night by cpurczel, on Flickr


Rawnsley Park - Night by cpurczel, on Flickr

Wow Carl, they look great!

Yes, my scope tracks the objects in its eyepiece. After you align the scope, a simple process of centering three stars in the eyepiece one after the other, it can then find and track any object. So, if you attach the camera to the telescope, it will track the image and avoid the distortion.