Eyepieces

Last night seemed a nice clear evening but as soon as I walked out the clouds came over so I took the time to take a good look at the eyepieces that came with my telescope and the other two I bought separately.

The 10mm and 25mm eyepieces supplied with my Sky-Watcher 130 had no apparent marking on them, which makes me suspicious of the quality. Looking at the manufacturer's website I have worked out that they are branded Super like these below (although mine didn't have the handy sticker to say what they were!).

The 10mm should give me 90x magnification, 180x with the Barlow lens added, and the 25mm should give me 36x magnification, 72x with the Barlow. I also ordered 6.3mm and 40mm Super Plössel eyepices to give me more options. The 40mm Revelation Astro eyepiece should really help me find my way around as a novice because the magnification is only 22x (44x with a Barlow) - this will give me the widest view possible. Maybe I might be able to start identifying things now. The 6.3mm was bought when I thought I was being sent the 650mm telescope so it may be too powerful with the Barlow for my telescope (142x without, 284x with a Barlow).

The Revelation Astro Super Plössel 40mm.

For the novices like me I worked out the magnification by dividing the focal length of the telescope by the focal length of the eyepiece. For example for my 25mm eyepiece this was worked out by using 900/25=36 magnification.

On the plus side, by taking a good look at them yesterday, I worked out why I was having problems seeing with them. I hadn't realised that the eye-cups fold over when the cover is on them in the dark on Saturday and was looking through the eyepieces without the cups in place. At least it will be more comfortable this evening when I use them!

First Use

Last night was nice and clear, although very windy. My garden is sheltered with houses and trees pretty much surrounding it; this means it's nice and sheltered from the wind, but it generally means I only have a good view of the sky north and above (my latitude is approximately 51.8 degrees according to http://itouchmap.com/latlong.html ). To observe the planets and the moon will mean travelling to a more open area which makes receiving the longer telescope instead of the one I ordered more annoying.

My aim for the hour or so I was out was to learn how to roughly align the mount ("Polar alignment") with Polaris and just get the hang of moving my Sky-Watcher Explorer 130 around to look at stuff. When I get my head around my mount I'll try and make an equatorial mount for dummies guide because all the guides I have seen assume some prior knowledge, of which I have none. I am pleased to say I managed to swap eyepieces easily and move the mount around on its two axes in the dark. I practiced tracking some stars using the fine adjustment knobs and it wasn't as difficult as some have made it out to be. I managed to track my target easily using all my eyepieces, although forgot to try my Barlow lens, which probably would have made it more difficult.

I had a few issues that I need to resolve (excuse the astronomy pun):

1) Identifying Stuff I could only see a few stars with the naked eye in any one part of the sky, but of course the point of a telescope is to show much more than you can see. For a total beginner like me this made it extremely difficult to work out whether I was looking at the star I thought I was. Even using the lens with the least magnification I had no idea what I was looking at and couldn't find stars I expected them to be near. I think I need to spend more time just looking at the sky and understanding the constellations a bit more. I also need to understand how much of space I can see through my telescope to give me an idea of how far I need to move it to star-hop to what I want to view. I also had a lot of problem using the red-spot scope. I'm not sure it was adequately aligned and there seems to be a bit of a knack to using it which I certainly don't have yet!

2) Tracking Although I had no problems tracking my target (not that I knew what that target was), it didn't stay in the middle of my view. With an equatorial mount I should be able to track a target just using the RA knob but I tried this a couple of times and I had to use both adjustment knobs to keep it centered. I guess this means I failed at setting the mount up correctly or I didn't align it properly. It wasn't horrendous and I managed alright so that's one positive outcome.

3) Viewing Looking through each lens isn't as easy as I thought it was going to be. The advice I read was to keep both eyes open but this makes it very hard to see for a beginner I think. Also to see the full circle of view available I found I had to hold my eye different ways for each lens. I naively thought it would be like binoculars where you just whack them up to your eyes and look through them - silly me!

Next time it's clear I will try and actually aim to find something and hopefully with a bit of experience some of these issues will disappear.
 

Impatience and Disappointment

My son persuaded me not to wait until he was away to set the telescope up and that he was ideally qualified to help at 7am this morning when he woke me up. With some trepidation I set about unpacking everything and mustered the courage to look at the instruction booklet.

I needn't have worried - the instruction booklet that came with my Sky-Watcher Explorer 130pm was very straight forward to follow and gave simple steps that I could easily understand. In less than an hour me and my 6 year old son had put it all together. He is extremely happy as this means he has a big box to play in! Although when it's in the box it all seems too heavy to be portable, once it is put together it doesn't seem so hard to move around. Balancing the scope was relatively simple although i really need to get my head around the equatorial mount it comes with.

I understand the concept of the sky appearing to rotate around the north pole (and therefore pretty much Polaris). How that translates into the movement adjustments I can make on my mount is causing me to scratch my head a bit. Hopefully it will become clearer once I've pointed it at something and tried to track it for a while. Unfortunately we had torrential rain in the hour before sunset this evening and thick clouds are blowing over so I have been unable to try it out. It is supposed to be clearer tomorrow night so I'll try again then.

What I have noticed while I was looking at some of the documentation that came with my scope is that the tube seems longer than the picture on the advert when I bought it. It seems like I have been sent the Sky-Watcher Explorer 130EM and not the 130PM. The difference being the EM has a focal length of 900mm and the PM is 650mm with better optics and £20 dearer. On the positive side the shop I bought it from supplied upgraded eyepieces. I wonder if they knew it was wrong and have tried to somewhat make up for it? I'll give ScopesnSkies a call on Tuesday because I ordered the 130PM on the back of all the reviews I read online and not to get what I asked for is disappointing. Now the scope is all set up (and most of the packaging recycled already) I might as well give it a go tomorrow and see what it's like.