Contentment

Want to appreciate your biggest scope more and quell aperture fever?
Periodically use your smallest telescope exclusively for four to six week
intervals. Works for me.


--
Martin
"Photographs From the Universe of Amateur Astronomy"
http://home.earthlink.net/~martinhowell

"Martin R. Howell" wrote:

Want to appreciate your biggest scope more and quell aperture fever?
Periodically use your smallest telescope exclusively for four to six week
intervals. Works for me.

Does this mean someone with only one telescope should buy a larger one
or a smaller one?


Tim
--
Copyright, patents and trademarks are government-granted,
time-limited monopolies. Intellectual property does not exist.

"Martin R. Howell" wrote in message
...
Want to appreciate your biggest scope more and quell aperture fever?
Periodically use your smallest telescope exclusively for four to six week
intervals. Works for me.


Or, just have something small that you use regularly, with your definition
of a big scope for use as time and circumstance permits.

I don't know how anyone can have just one scope, unless it's small enough to
carry out back in one trip with virtually zero cooldown time, and without
need for charts. Something that you can walk out with 30-50x eyepiece in
place, and just poke around at the showpiece targets, the moon, and with
which you can see planets with some surface detail at 120x.

One might even install DSCs if you can afford, to make easy work of aiming
at less well-known, but easily detectable objects for wide fields in small
apertures. The point is to have a no time investment setup and breakdown.

After the 8" SCT for visual and imaging, and the 12" Dob for deep sky, the
best thing I did was to buy a 4" wide field refractor on an a full range of
motion altazimuth mount. In fact, there is only one scope in my inventory
that I intend to upgrade quality wise in the future, and that's the little
refractor. The rest can keep as they are, for the amount of use they see,
and for their desirable price/performance ratios.

Or, maybe to state it another way, one should really put their money into
the equipment that they will use _most_ of the time, not the other way
around. That means different things to different people, but with aperture
fever abounding and Dobs on the cheap, it is a big temptation to blow a
thousand dollars (US) on a big aperture scope (plus accessories), that then
gets used but once every two weeks or so. There's nothing wrong with that,
it that does it for you, but it is wise to be prepared to discover that
getting out more often is better than having more aperture. Especially if
you live in a cloud infested environment, that seems to peak with new moon.
I seem to be spending a lot more time these days observing the moon, rather
than cursing it. It doesn't take a big scope to see lunar detail.

-Stephen

Want to appreciate your biggest scope more and quell aperture fever?
Periodically use your smallest telescope exclusively for four to six =
week
intervals. Works for me.


I had sort of the opposite happen to me. I bought a Tele Vue 76 in =
Feburary
and find that i enjoy using it so much, and that its views please me so
well, that i'm selling my now unused 10" dob. ;-)

-Florian

"Florian" wrote in message ...
Want to appreciate your biggest scope more and quell aperture fever?
Periodically use your smallest telescope exclusively for four to six
week
intervals. Works for me.


... I bought a Tele Vue 76 in Feburary and find that i enjoy using it
so much, and that its views please me so well, that i'm selling my
now unused 10" dob...

I *nearly* had an identical experience with an Orion ED80 versus my
10" LX200 classic. If I hadn't been building an observatory and moving
to CCD imaging at the time, the LX200 would have been toast by now!

It's surprising how much of a deterrent setup time becomes. You think
you want the biggest, bestest scope you can carry and set up, and you
can't imagine any circumstance where you wouldn't want to put the
effort into getting out there to look at things. But gradually, over
time, it wears thin. I was getting to that stage when I got the 80ED
(ostensibly as a guide scope). Seems the advice that "the best scope
is the one you use most" is something you HAVE to learn for yourself.

Even now, with everything tucked away under a rolling roof and ready
to use at the drop of a hat, I still find myself drawn to the 80ED for
CCD imaging far more than I thought I'd be. So much for "just a guide
scope" eh! It's faster, requires less critical guiding, less critical
focusing and gives a larger FOV than the LX200. I can rattle off a
couple of hundred LRGB frames (with flats and darks) and get images of
3 or 4 objects in just one evening with the 80ED. No chance of that
with the LX200 - it's one object, two at most, and a few tens of
frames for each filter. But they are "better" images, so I'm not
saying it's not worthwhile - just a different experience (that I seem
to be avoiding. Quantity in favour of quality perhaps?)

As I'm relatively new to imaging, the quick, easy result from 80ED is
pretty compelling, even though the resolution is limited to about
1.4arcsec compared to the LX200's 0.45 arcsec. This is very obvious
when you compare star sizes in rich field images. For instance, I
found the Crescent Nebula is a better picture if done on the LX200
because in an 80ED image, the stars of the Milky Way tend to dominate
due to their size. (Note: that's not definitive as I got the images on
different nights so it could have been poor seeing made the 80ED star
images even bigger than usual). But a big nebula that's relatively
poor in stars (e.g M42) is much more conveniently captured with the
smaller scope.

I was so sure I'd only be interested in imaging galaxies of 10arcmin
or less with mega-long exposures! But I seem to be picking targets of
30arcmin or OVER instead! Seems I can't even predict my own
behaviour...

Cheers
Beats

"Stephen Paul" wrote in message
...

"Martin R. Howell" wrote in message
...
Want to appreciate your biggest scope more and quell aperture fever?
Periodically use your smallest telescope exclusively for four to six week
intervals. Works for me.


Or, just have something small that you use regularly, with your definition
of a big scope for use as time and circumstance permits.

I don't know how anyone can have just one scope, unless it's small enough
to carry out back in one trip with virtually zero cooldown time, and
without need for charts. Something that you can walk out with 30-50x
eyepiece in place, and just poke around at the showpiece targets, the
moon, and with which you can see planets with some surface detail at 120x.


I only have 1 scope and don't wish for another. I can only look through 1
scope at a time and mine seems to fit the bill. (a vixen VC200L). It would
be nice to be able to see deeper but that is what my CCD does instead.

Terry B
Moree
Australia

"Florian" wrote in message ...
Want to appreciate your biggest scope more and quell aperture fever?
Periodically use your smallest telescope exclusively for four to six
week
intervals. Works for me.


I had sort of the opposite happen to me. I bought a Tele Vue 76 in
Feburary
and find that i enjoy using it so much, and that its views please me so
well, that i'm selling my now unused 10" dob. ;-)

-Florian

About 14 years ago I bought a Ultima 11 with a couple of eyepieces. I
used this scope nightly for about 2 years, and then dropped back to
a more reduced utilization rate.

About 8 years ago, I bought a 6" AP APO on EBay, then found a mount.
I use this scope on planets.

About 7 years ago I bought a 20" mirror and build a 20" DOB arround it.
For the last 6 years I have used this scope almost to the exclusion of
the others (except for planets).

Last year I loaned out the C11 to a friend. She is very happy with it,
my wife is happy to have it out of the garage.....

Last month I picked up a dSLR and I have been seriously thinking about
using the 6" APO and the C11 for photo work--something I said I would
never do.

Moral: Don't sell your (un)used scopes--wait until you need them again
--you will!

Mitch

"Mitch Alsup" wrote in message
om...

Moral: Don't sell your (un)used scopes--wait until you need them again
--you will!

I put my Ultima 8 up on Astromart for a couple of days. Then I came to my
senses.