In response to Tim's M42 users email asking to hear from any of us amateur astro's I couldn't resist starting the old mine's bigger than yours thread.
So to start us off i'll get out my, somewhat battered, 10 inch meade newtonian

Hey ..this is great!
Mine may not be that big:-)
Its a Stars and Scopes 6" Reflecting with EQ mount, with a 2" refracting piggybacked to it. The 2" was a Christmas gift from my mother in law. The only thing wrong with it was the riggity mount, so I just took some bungy cords and attached it to my newly aquired 6EQ. Works great now.

This scope is pretty good for deep sky objects and am able to get in to quite a few since the summer started. The Antatres sector has lots of open and globular clusters and the misty lagoon nebula. Very cool.

Just ordered a Telrad finder which will improve my observing 110%. The finder that came with the scope was not the greatest. The Telrad is a 1x naked eye view with 3 LED rings superimposed on the sky, so no flipping charts around. Just point and click:-)Lots of Telrad charts on the web as well.

heres the link to what I have:

http://www.starsandscopes.com/starsandscopes%20reflector%20t elescope%2079-6484.htm

I was actually able to purchase this with Sound Design money

Sometime I would like to get the Orion 10" Dob, or eveen build my own 10" Dob. But gotta start somewhere. Back in my teens, I used to have an edmund scientific 4 1/4 " refector. Quite nice actually. Don't know what happened to it

so lets here from others!

TC

nice kit tim
glad to see you putting your sound design income to good use, it's lucky for me i didn't have to do the same as i don't make money from either hobby lol, but i did get the 10 inch almost for free as i rescued it from a skip at work. only had to get a few eyepieces and a new rack and pinion focuser, however it's curently lacking a guidescope, which makes finding stuff fun.

I would really recommend the Telrad. Just got mine yesterday ( YEAH!) and what a differance!It's about 45.00 with shipping from Amazon.com, but well worth it.

http://www.amazon.com/o/dt/assoc/handle-buy-box=B0000ALKAN

http://www.backyard-astro.com/equipment/accessories/telrad/t elrad.html

Another cheaper idea is to get a daisy rifle finder from walmart or wherever,( I think 12.00) and you can modify it for astromical use. There are web sites that tell you how.

http://home.att.net/~jblessin/daisy.htm

But with the Telrad, theres lot of charts on the net you can print out to use with the 3 circles it displays in the sky..easy to find things! Had a great night last night..got 3 star Clusters right away near Antares!

TC

I have a neighbor who said using binoculars is fine, too. So there! My wifes are 7x35, good enough for the moon that I'm still trying to lasso for her!

His can see Saturns 3 rings fairly well. I didn't even know that Venus had rings?!

Yes...there are lots of good books on binocular Astronomy. You can see a lot of star clusters and even some nebula in 'em! M42 ( the great nebula in Orion) shows up pretty good!( but you have to wait untill winter now..or get up really early in August) 7x35 is OK..but for astronomical use it's been sugged that 7x50 or a 10x50 are good. Bigger aparture gets the bigger galaxies ;-)Still have a to grab some binocs for myself as well.

TC

Tim Conrardy wrote


Back in the mid seventies I lived right around the corner from Edmund Scientific and would often go in on saturday afternoon for their lazer light show, often playing Pink Floyd "Saucer Full of Secrets" or Tangerine Dream "Phaedra". I was really into astronomy back then and built myself a 6" reflector. I worked at an eyeglass company which was just down the street and was very familiar with grinding lenses so it was no problem for me to grind and polish the mirror. Took about 100 hours but finished it and spent one season with it. I eventually had to sell it while in college so i miss being able to view the sky. If I ever have money to get a good one again, I won't make it myself but will buy instead. love the reflectors more than refractors, will try to get a 10" this time.

Yeah..i tried grinding my own..but it never came off. Takes lots of patience. Glad you were able to do it. Back then however, telescopes were expensive, and it was more practicle to make your own. Today, you can pretty good quality for not as much. I got mine for 250.00, but there are many different types to choose from. If I was to start over again, I would get an 8 or 10 " DOB..which is the easiest to handle, with a telrad finder. However you can pick up a 10" Dob from Orion for about $550.00...not so bad.

TC

I had a Celestron Nexstar 4 but sold it two years ago - it was just hopeless trying to use it here (Sydney Australia) with all the light pollution

I bought M42 about five days after buying Cameleon 5000. I have barely touched C5K since. M42 truly is an astonishing synth and I'm looking forward to making time to really get into it.

G.

Thanks for the kind words on M42 compared to Cameleon. I am still very much involved with Ben, making sound sets and a lot of the factory ( spacy) sounds are mine, but M42 is different.

RE: Light Pollution: Just found out you can get special filters ofr combating this if you are in the city. They are called nebula filters, and there are different types: narrowband and wideband. They are a bit expensive ( 60.00 from Orion) but sometime would like to get one. I am in Santa Clara, CA ( San Jose more or less) and there is light pollution. But I am lucky to have a pretty dark backyard where it sheilds all the streetlights. I can see pretty much most of the constellations, so I can use my Telrad to good effect. Can't wait to get to dark skies sometime however!

TC

i hear you on the light pollution, it's a killer near any city, and london (where i am) is possibly the worst.
however there's a cool bit of free software that lets you stack multiple images and does some nifty frame alignment so you can overlay them. basically with that and the guts of a webcam bolted on an eyepiece you can get some stunning, and i mean stunning, deepsky and planetary images even with pretty bad light pollution. I haven't got round to setting it up on my system but it's something i hope to do when the nights get a bit darker. if anyones interested i'll dig out the url

Tim - thanks for the tip on the telrad.
oh for charts and general pc based panetarium software it's hard to beat hallo northern sky (www.hnsky.org) and it's free.

Jesus, I can't allow myself to get involved in this discussion..

You shouldn't have said anything to me about it, Tim!

hey..I regard you as THE Authority on Space here on KvR..so please do ( and hang on to your nebula)

TC

Eight-inch Celestron S-C, four-inch Meade S-C, buncha Nagler ultra-wide field eyepieces, 11x90 Meade binocs.

M42 VSTi's on my "try it soon!" list. :-) Still recovering from the Cameleon group buy. (Been turning astronomical images into presets.)

Meffy

[Edit] Previous edit removed -- I was thinking of another thread that directed me here. :-)

hey...thats some serious stuff...and BIG Binocs too! You must need a tripod just for that:-)I still have to get some more eyepieces. My only real good one is a 25MM plossil...but it allows me to see a lot of stuff.

RE: M42: you can download the demo,then as vurt would say: slap down the plastic
really though...you should try out the demo and see if it meets your needs.

RE: Cameleon: you must have got my idea on the bitmap thread as I was trying to get voices from the saturn ring images. Nice stuff, and informative thread!

TC