My Equipment - The Telescope

So, what I have decided to do over my first few posts on the blog is to discuss the equipment I currently have before moving onto detailing what I have actually seen so far. Anyway, as you can imagine the first and most important piece of equipment for astronomy is the telescope itself which I received for Christmas thanks to my incredibly generous parents.

The telescope they bought me was a Skywatcher Skymax 127 SynScan AZ GOTO and you can see the picture I took of it on Christmas day below.

The basic facts about the telescope are that the aperture on the telescope is 127mm (5 Inches for those who use old school measurements), its focal length is 1500mm and it is a Maksutov-Cassegrain design. I am not going to explain what that all means  because you can just check google for yourself but the result of this design is that I have a nice compact telescope that should be much easier to pack in my car and take on journeys to dark sites and it should show me a fair few objects although it does have a limited field of view.

The SynScan AZ GOTO element of the telescope means that it is an Azimuth-Altitude mount and utilises the SynScan GOTO computer control system. So basically, I can use the little controller that comes with the telescope and tell it where to point without having to do star hopping or any actual work! This got me very excited because I assumed it would be easy for me to just select cool objects like galaxies and such like and the scope would happily go there even though I had no idea where in the sky they might be. Unfortunately I didn't anticipate that for the software to work it needed to know where it was and which way it was pointing and therefore before use it needed aligning. So, I sat outside on Christmas evening trying to work out what and where the bloody stars were that I could use for alignment. This was my first lesson in astronomy, no matter how lazy you want to be, you still  need to know some basics about the night sky!

In the end I did get it aligned but it wasn't the best and I don't think I saw anything that interesting beyond the tiny disc of Uranus and a smudge that was the Andromeda Galaxy. Basically I didn't really know what to look for. This was my second lesson, you really need to plan your nights observations because I probably wasted lots of time trying to work out what I could see.

An interesting observation I had when aligning the scope on Christmas evening and on a few other nights is that I struggled to get good alignment because I found it difficult to tell which star in the finderscope was the correct one to home in on. After trawling the internet I decided that the best bet was to use my finderscope alongside a non magnified red-dot style of finder. I could use the non magnified finder to lock in on a star I could see with the naked eye and align nice and easily before centering it even more with the magnified finder. Across the forums people praise something called a Telrad but when I checked it out I decided the thing would be massive and look stupid on my rather compact telescope. Therefore I procured an alternative called the Rigel Quickfinder which I have used twice now and have decided it is the best thing since sliced bread! The GOTO software has been so much more exact and if I am not sure I can get a good sense of where in the sky I am pointing compared to the stars I can easily see. I have posted a picture of the little beauty below although this image doesn't show the red light finder circles.