"Trail Shredder" wrote in
:

I just bought a Celestron Telescope, mainly to help educate the kids
and check out Mars. I checked out Mars last night and just wasn't
impressed. I have had people tell me that they could see details with
a pair of Binoculars.

I certainly don't believe this is possible with any hand held binoculars.
Of course there are binoculars that have 125mm objectives and changable
eyepieces but they are certainly not hand held.


It didn't look much more different than with
the naked eye. I figured out that the scope has a focal length of
700mm and I had in a 4mm eyepiece. So I guess my magnification power
is 700/4=175. Is that correct?

Yes. What is the aperture of your scope?. A rule of thumb says max useful
magnification is about 50 x per inch or 2 x per mm.


Is there something that I might be
doing wrong? It also seemed hard to determine when it was in focus.
At one time it was huge but looked very blurred, once it looked in
focus, it was small as if I wasn't looking through the scope. It has
an alignment thing with it too and they assume you know where these
stars are.....Is there a simple guide to finding these stars?

Your problem could just be atmospheric conditions caused by turbulent air
.. If you are in the northern hemisphere, Mars doesn't get to a very good
altitude for this particular opposition - that means you are having to
look through more of the earth's turbulent air. If you see stars that are
wildly twinkling to the maked eye, then you can be sure that the seeing
conditions will be bad through a telescope.

As to your other question, i.e identifying alignment stars, they are
normally fairly bright ones, you just need to learn to identify them. I
would suggest a few things to help:

1. Download a planetarium program. You tell the program your location and
the time and date and it will show what your local sky will look like,
identifying various stars etc. You could try the demo version of Skymap
Pro at www.skymap.com or the completely free, Cartes Du Ceil at
www.stargazing.net/astropc/. You can use these to help learn the
constellations and bright stars.

2. Join your local astronomy club or society - there will be plenty of
people there who can help you.

3. Get the book called "Turn Left at Orion" - I don't recall the name of
the author right now but it is a good book to help learn your way around
the sky.


Regards Llanzlan





Thanks in advance,
Brian