Telescopes and Astronomy

[FactsOfLife]

in case you were wondering what my latest glass looked like...

[Python14]

Holy guacamole dude. That is one nice peice of equipment. I'm a little scared to ask what the rest of the arsenal looks like.

BTW, One tech question, well, sorta. When people are writing down journals of what they see, alot of people include some stats on each object. things like RA, Dec, magnitude, size, etc. But sometimes they include "seeing" as a stat too. I understand what it means, but I don't really understand how they come up with it. Is there some internationally accepted gauge to judge seeing on, or is it just up to each astronomer to make his/her judgement on it? I mean, for me a very excellent night might be considered a horrible excuse for darkness to another astronomer. Also, if it is a judgement thing, what is the system that most people use to come up with it? Thank you so much.

[FactsOfLife]

I have 3 scopes for personal use at the moment. That AR6, an Orion 120ST, and an 18 inch RedShift Dob.

As far as the scale for seeing goes, there's a couple of things associated with it. Transparency, light pollution, and seeing.

Seeing usually is measured the same as transparency on a scale from 1-10. 1 being solid cloud cover, 10 being perfect clear skies. And the seeing being 1 bad turbulence/atmospherics and 10 being perfect clear pinpoint stars with no atmospherics.

Light pollution is kind of subjective. You might live in what could be considered a super dark skies area like the middle of the country, and have a bonehead neighbor with unshielded sodium vapor lamps all over the place.

You could see a night with poor seeing but it's transparency is up in the high end of the scale. Maybe a front came through and the atmosphere is very turbulent. Images in the EP fade in and out of focus and you can't get pinpoint stars at focus. You might scale the night like this:

Transparency: 8
Seeing: 3

[Python14]

I see now. So it's really just the astronomers good or bad judgement. Good. Makes it easier on newer guys like me.

How is that Orion 120ST? I've been hearing good things about it, especially with DSOs. It's definitely in my price range.

Also, Do you have any astrophotos from any of your scopes? I'd love to see them.

[FactsOfLife]

The 120 is a nice little scope for quick viewing. It is nice for some DSO work. The downside of it is the real short focal length means low power only. It starts to get mushy much past 120x.

For the price I'd go with a Newt or a Mak before I bought another one of these.

Yeah a lot of observing is subjective. What one person may be able to see, or claims they can see will not be visible to another.

Yeah lemme dig up some stuff I've imaged. I have a new setup I'm playing with now and have to get some clear skies. It's been horrible here for nearly 2 weeks now.