Altitude doesn’t hurt, either, a trip above 10k’ reveals a lot.
That’s about it. Living in Chicago, observing for you will soon mean a road trip, because you’ll get bored observing just the Moon, the brighter planets, and just a handful of the brightest open star clusters.
On the other hand, a good DSLR camera and suitable lens can capture a surprising number of stars that you can’t see with the unaided eye, even under conditions of moderate light pollution. The catch is that you need Photoshop and a third party filter to bring them out.
I’m in a Bortle 5 area, and this is one of my photos at 50mm, f/2.2, 3" exposure, and ISO 3200, no post processing.
Pleiades and Hyades, unprocessed
Here’s the same shot, stacked with four others and edited to remove most of the light pollution.
Pleiades and Hyades after postprocessing
And here’s most of the constellation Andromeda, with the Andromeda Galaxy near the center top frame. It’s pretty much a smudge, admittedly, but I’m surprised I was able to capture it at all. There’s not much detail, but I’m sure I could do better with a tracking mount. The constellation diagram was added by the third party nova.astrometry.net site.
A timely pop up on my FB feed.
Best Telescopes For Urban Stargazing | High Point Scientific
One thought on you current binos, are you familiar with the diopter adjustment? That can make a huge difference and is often overlooked.
I took pictures of my 8-inch Celestron telescope with an equatorial mount. I paid about $1,250 for it and never used it. I emailed the pics to the president of the local astronomy club, and he said he’d let people know. I’m asking $850 for it. (Lost the software, but have the manual.)
I bought a Celestron C5 spotting scope for bird watching, but it works pretty well as a telescope also. I was able to see Jupiter’s rings, albeit not as clearly as with a C90. I also bought another eyepiece and some filters for it. A good tripod that doesn’t shake is very important. I bought a Manfrotto that I’m happy with.
The 5’’/127mm is a pretty common aperture for that style of optical tube. I’d bet that the only difference between the spotting and telescope version are some graphics and the 45 deg diagonal. The 45 gives you an upright view, which is handy for terrestrial use, and also for finding your way around the night sky. On the downside it uses a prism instead of a mirror, which costs you some optical quality. 90 deg diagonals are also better for looking straight up, which is generally better because you have less atmosphere to penetrate.
Convenience vs quality is, of course, an endless debate and a personal choice, but on the bright side, it’s pretty cheap to have one of each.
The C5 is a fine astronomy telescope It should be slightly better than the C90 on planets and the Moon - it has about twice the light gathering ability and almostbthe same focal length. It’s an f10 design, so the image will be brighter and it will work better on deep sky objects like globular clusters and brighter galaxies.
You do need a better mount for it, though. A C90 works well on a photo tripod, but the C5 is a little too big and heavy and should really be on a sturdier mount.
You should get a 2X barlow lens for planets and the Moon. These scopes can go up to about 2.5X before running into diffraction limits.
Do you kmow what mount it is? If it’s a C8 on a CGEM mount, that’s a great price. The mount alone sells for $1599 new now, and goes for about $1,000 used. If it’s on an AVX mount it’s only slightly cheaper. If it’s on a Nextar mount, the scope and mount can still be sold for $1500-$2000 or so. If it’s an old C8 mounted on a smaller manual tripod like a CG-4, your price might be reasonable.
I paid $2300 CDN for my C8 EdgeHD on a CGEM about six years ago. That setup is now about $3400 US, or over $4,000 here. Crazy inflation on telescopes these days.
No idea. As I said, I never used it. Here are the photos I took.
That’s an 8" Newtonian on an ‘advanced GT’ digital mount. That’s one of the earlier mounts thatncame with the hand controller. I think your price is in the right range for that. I’ve seen them for $1300 on the Cloudy Nights buynand sell.
The best advice I got was to buy a telescope you will use. I tried the Dobsonians our club owns, and while they gave nice images, I wanted something smaller and lighter. I have a single car garage with no room for a telescope, so it has to be stored in the basement. I knew if I had to manhandle a large Dob up the stairs every time, it wouldn’t get much use.
I went with a 4" apochromatic refractor, the Sky Watcher Evostar 100ED, on a manual equatorial mount, the Celestron CG-4. I sprung for the dual tracking motors, so it tracks nicely, its just not a computerized goto mount.
My reasoning was, while I am learning, spend a little more on apochromatic optics, and less on the mount. Then, when I want to upgrade to a computerized goto mount, I will still have good optics. There really isn’t an upgrade path for a Dobsonian.
Do you have a recommendation? The Manfrotto I have is quite heavy and has a ball mount. I originally bought it for my Nikon.
Given that I am in a very light polluted area I think I’d care more about the moon and brighter planets.
While I might get out to dark places to see more remote/dim objects (and I probably would) most things I’d look at would be local (as these things go).
I’d love to be able to let people in my city wow to views of the moon like in the video below. What scopes are best for that?
I’ll add that I hope the video above inspires @Johnny_L.A to take his scope out for a spin.
Here is a recent Reddit post where someone took a decent photo of Andromeda with only a camera and a tripod (and a lot of post-processing):
Again, a Schmidt-Cassegrain or a Matsukov-Cassegrain will do best from a light polluted area for viewing planets and the Moon. They also have the advantage of being the easiest to transport and set up.
Which one to get really depends on your budget. Any of them, including the C90, will give you images about as good as that 8" Dobsonoan in the video.
Dobsonians excel at being ‘light buckets’. They provide a lot of aperture for the money. They are excellent for viewing deep sky objects from a dark site. For planets and the moon in a city, not so much. They work fine, but are larger and more unwieldy than they need to be and you don’t need the light gathering ability for planets and the Moon. In fact, a big wide field telescope will just amplify the light pollution. From a light polluted area a narrow field telescope like an SCT or Mak will work better.
I was going to take the C90 out tonight and get some photos of the lunar eclipse and post them here, but we are now forecast to be clouded out, of course.
For visual purposes, you can find out if your tripod is good enough by simply mounting the scope and trying it. If your mount isn’t stiff enough, you’ll get frustrated because every time you touch the scope the image will jump around. And you might have to wait for the shaking to stop before you can view.
Only you will know if the amount of shaking is too much for your enjoyment. Maybe your tripod and ball head are really tight and it will be acceptable.
For 5000$ you can deffinetly buy a telescope for deep-space watching. And it’s much more exciting than just planets. I would recommend at least something good enough to watch closest galaxies
Thanks! Any recommendations? Even if not a specific scope maybe advice on a reflector over a refractor (and so on)?
Welcome to the SDMB!
You don’t need anything near $5,000 to look at galaxies. But again deep-sky objects are problematic from a light-polluted area. Even with a large scope galaxies will look basically like a dim smudge, if you can see them at all against the sky glow.
With astrophotography you can do better, because you can take ‘flats’ that will help cancel the sky glow and use other processing techniques to improve the image.
For example, here’s an image I took of M51 (one of the brightest galaxies in our sky), taken from inside a big city with my 8" Celestron::
It’s a fairly decent image, but it took a lot of processing to get there. It’s the result of 20 images, each 60s exposure, plus ‘flats’ and ‘darks’ to process out noise and sky glow… To get an idea of what you might see looking through an eyepiece, here’s a single, unprocessed frame:
Planets and moons, on the other hand, are just fine from inside a city, as they are bright enough to completely overpower the sky glow. Here’s Jupiter with the same scope:
And an image of the Lunar Appenines:
An even more magnified version, using a 2X Barlow lens:
The white arrow points to the exact location where Apollo 15 landed. The squiggly line is Hadley Rille, a collapsed lava tube. I’m fairly proud of the resolution I got out of this, especially shooting through the roiling air of the city.
This is the telescope setup I used for these images:
