It is really sad and frustrating that so many people have had that same experience, souring them on the whole thing forever. Many well-meaning parents and individuals get these things and find they are useless, but don’t know why. It is criminal that they still are being sold.
It does require some study and effort to learn to use one of the good scopes. The most difficult part may be the polar alignment, which is necessary to have the scope be able to track an object as it travels across the sky. Once this is done, even the hand-operated instruments let you follow the thing, but most have a built-in motor that does this very well. Without that being done properly, once you have found an object, it is not long before it drifts out of view. With it, you can watch for hours and it will be right in the middle of the lens.
If you want to get into astrophotography, then that is another story. You then have to “guide” the scope to keep it **exactly **in place to get a sharp image. Before CCD cameras (the thing that makes digital cameras work), sometimes we had to make exposures of more than an hour. Sitting outside, guiding a scope in zero temperatures took a lot of devotion. Or stupidity.
Many of the relatively inexpensive astronomical scopes today have built-in computers that make it a breeze to locate any object. One just picks the one they want and the computer guides the scope right to it. Many purists feel this is not fair, and one should always “star-hop” to find anything. This debate has gone on for years, so make up your own mind and pick your poison. Me, I’d rather spend the time observing or photographing rather than cussing as I tried to find the “faint fuzzy” I wanted, often too small even to see in the finder scope. Even with these fancy scopes, you still have to polar align it before you can do any of this.
Believe me, if you are fascinated with the subject, it is all worth it. Once you master the technique, it all becomes automatic. Don’t give up.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but ‘polar alignment’, and any attendant frustration, is not required for Schmidt-Cassegrain scopes (although it is necessary even for SCTs if you’re gonna do any astrophotography. For good old plain ‘observing’, though, it’s not needed).
Polar alignment is necessary for any type of telescope – reflector or refractor – to keep the object centered in the viewfinder as the earth rotates (as long as you have a clock drive on the scope).
However, many small telescopes now use an altazimuth mount, with stepper motor drives on both axes in order to track the stars. This works pretty well for eyeballing nebula, but once you start taking long exposures field rotation becomes a problem. People get around that by taqking multiple, short exposures, and using stacking software to add them together and correct the alignment.
:smack: When am I going to learn to listen to that little voice that tells me I should look something up before posting an answer? Especially since my scope (which I haven’t touched in years), has an alt-azimuthal mount.
What I meant to say is that KarlGausss is mistaken and that, in general, the way the scope handles light doesn’t affect the type of mount needed. That much is right, isn’t it?
Another factor in favor of binoculars is that, for many of the more interesting objects you can actually see with modest equipment, light-gathering power is much more important than magnification. The core of the Andromeda galaxy, for example, is actually a rather large object in the sky; the problem with seeing it, is that it’s also dim.
So: when you look through either binoculars or a telescope, the size of the lens or mirror gives you a certain “light budget” to spend. You can “spend” that budget on increasing the size of the image, or you can “spend” it on making the image brighter with better contrast. Whatever you spend one way, you don’t have available for the other.
So with an object that takes up an arc in the sky comparable to (for example) the moon, you may be much better off spending your light budget on brightness – it’s already big enough to see.
So, it you want to look at the Andromeda Galaxy, or the M42 nebula in Orion, or the Pleiades, high-powered magnification is likely to be worse than useless. You’d magnify the object so much it won’t fit in your telescope’s field of view.
Binoculars, on the other hand, may well give you a very nice image indeed.
The 6°-7.5° field of view of most binoculars also makes it a breeze to scan the skies for comets. There’s usually at least a couple of those every year that look nice in binocs, but are damned near impossible to find with an iffy map and the 0.5° to 2.0° field of a telescope.
