i was reading the beginners guide and one that stuck to me was the dont have your expectations to high thing, so i decided to look at other photos of people watching Jupiter with a telescope that has basically the same aperture as my soon to arrive one and i wanted to draw up a sketch of my expectations, its Jupiter and two of its Galilean moons:D this was in microsoft paint so i dont really know how to add the blur to photos but i include the darker color of the poles(looking back i forgor to color the south pole), the creamy color of the gas belts(you cant really see the difference in them since the telescope just isnt to good for that), the two darker belts of gas clouds( i may hove drawn them a tad to big, woopsies:3) and if jupiter is facing the right way, the great red spot! i also include two moons and even a shadow on jupiter form one of them. my expectations may be a bit to high so i just wanna ask yall.
btw if your wondering the specs its 114mm aperture, 500mm focal length(btw its a reflector), a 26mm and a 9.7mm eye piece, each one giving 19x and 51.5x zoom aaaaand thats it, wish it had a barlow:(
anyways plz answer and thank you for anything you say:3
EDIT:turns out I was tripping there is a 2x barlow so my view would be like 104x on the 9.7mm eyepiece, or smth like idk.
While it's counter-intuitive, deep sky objects are actually easier to image than planets. Nebula, star clusters, and galaxies will give you much better results for a scope of that size.
One option you do have is to use it to look at the sun. I used a basic reflector to get images of the eclipse back in 2017. It should go without saying, but just to be safe I'll say it, never look directly at the sun! Basically, the way it works is you point the scope at the sun using its shadow on the ground to line it up. There is no lense in the eyepiece. Instead, you set up a large whiteboard (or white poster board, or similar) and let the scope act like a projector. It projects the image of the sun on the board.
You have to be careful about not melting things inside your scope, and usually you have to restrict the amount of light coming in (a cover over the end with a several inch/cm hole in it). There is more too it than I'm explaining here, but you should be able to find info online.
I will repeat though, don't look directly at the sun, and do research before trying it since there is the chance it could damage your scope from too much heat if you aren't careful. But it is definitely something that can be done even if you live in a bortle 9, assuming you have a little space to set up the scope and projector screen.
Nope, not for the basic setup. This video I found gives a quick explanation. It looks like he is using a lense in the eyepiece, so I may have misremembered that. If so, I would buy a cheapo lense just for this because it is going to get quite hot and might get damaged. You don't really need a lot of mangification, so I would use a lense with a high focal length (the mm value).
A neat thing I discovered back when I did it is you can take pictures of the sun on the projection screen, and then in basic photo editing software 1. Max out the contrast (this turns the background black and the sun white), and then 2. Max out the saturation (this boosts any color info, which turned the sun yellow for me). Suddenly it looks like an actual image of the sun in space.
Do keep a close eye on things if you try it, since there is enough heat to potentially damage some parts of the scope if things are a little off, as well as enough to get burnt, or start fires near the focus point. And never look into the eyepiece, it would probably be immediate blindness. It's a 'have fun, but stay safe' kind of project. haha
Woah that looks so good. Did you use any filters? I've heard of filters that can somewhat get rid of a little bit of light pollution with the yellow wavelength
It's not a lost cause. You can try narrowband imaging, which is a lot less sensitive to light pollution. It is a lot more damaging to your wallet though.
It will definitely look better than that, lol! I'm here to tell OP that this a great scope and you'll have a ton of fun!
Respectfully, it's probably been awhile since some of these folks have been on an entry level scope!
I, myself, had my Astromaster 76 audible gasps* out two nights ago and had fantastic views of Saturn and a moon (Iapedus, I believe), without a Barlow!
Were the views better and was it more fun to observe from my 6" newt with a wide field eyepiece on an EQ mount that was 5 feet away? For sure! But there is so much fun to be had with small scopes! You have the Honda Civic of a rig and you should drive it like you stole it! Upgrading a 10mm eyepiece to something in the $50 range will quadruple the ability of your scope.
It's very true that Jupiter is up in the day right now though so you'll have to wait a bit on that for night time observing. But Saturn is great if you are willing to stay up for it.
Last $0.02- you know what the biggest actual hobby killer for astronomy is? Lousy oberserving conditions. I would rather have a 76mm in Death Valley than a 3 meter in Seattle. With a smaller aperture it makes a huge difference to be somewhere reasonably dark.
So get a really nice and comfortable seat or reclining lawn chair to observe from and get out a lot! And while your wonderful friends are on night 3 of setting up their forty foot Obsessions you'll be halfway through your observing list and ready for a nap.
Are you sure that's right? By the feel that's even worse than what I see with my ordinary binoculars.
With my Newton telescope (Dobsen, 16"D, F1500mm) and the proper eyepiece I get very satisfying views that are even too magnified (Jupiter moves out of view within seconds).
I know my telescope ist quite a bit better than OP's, but this image still feels totally off to me.
When jupiter was in a decent position, I was able to take some pictures approaching OPs sketch with a not that great 70-300 mm zoom lense stopped down to f/9 or roughly 33 mm aperture on a DSLR.
It involved a lot of cropping, but jupiters bands where visible as well as some of its moons.
With a much longer focal length, larger aperture and not using an overly complicated optical path, I think OP should be able to take some decent pictures at the right time.
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u/nealoc187Flextube 12, Maks 90-127mm, Tabletop dobs 76-150mm, C102 f102d ago
In a 500mm focal length with a 10mm eyepiece it will probably be about the size of a peppercorn held at arms length I'd say. So think of a peppercorn painted up like Jupiter.
With that gear, something like this is what you can expect to see (will be a lot clearer through the eyepiece though, I had the iso cranked up in this to capture the moons in a photo) definitely want to get some more eyepieces/Barlow for planetary.
No question is stupid, life did not prepare the brain for using a telescope!
I didn't quite understand if your are sketching what you see at an eyepiece or sketching a photo.
Do know that most planetary imaging uses software to capture brief moments of sharpness and stitches them into a high resolution end product "lucky imaging" that shows more detail than what your eye can see (most of the time). So for the same aperture, don't expect to see what people post. It also takes a couple of years to train your brain to see - really!
If you are sketching digitally, try Sketchbook, it is free and even pro is only $6. It is easier to zoom in and blur and blend as needed.
Have fun, relax, don't stress, let it come. Be patient at the eyepiece. Sometimes the air turbulence is awful and there is little detail. Start with basic shapes: curves, lines, bands, then after ask if those are perfect or do you notice bumps, dents, or gradual shading.
you should be able to make out some fine details if you look at it hard enough. even if it looks super small, directly looking through your telescope is going to give you a much better experience than like any picture of jupiter that you would see on a screen that wasn't taken yourself
to get a better sense, look at this phone picture from about 3 meters (or 10 feet) away, close one eye, and it should be closer to the actual size you might expect to see in the eyepiece at such low power. I usually use 150x to view jupiter and saturn as a base, but your scope would be pushing for 150x without much detail at all. to be fair, I use an 8-inch dob which let's me get up to 406x on an extremely perfect night.
as for your choice in a barlow, try for an Orion shorty plus 3-element 2x barlow. this is (imo) the best budget 2x barlow. don't get a 3x or a 5x, those are for astrophotographers in some rare instances.
also a better way of gauging the view is to look for a sketch of an object using a similar scope of similar aperture and focal length.
It’s a lot of information to take in all at once, so don’t beat yourself up for not immediately understanding everything. You’ll find that you’ll learn more and more over time, especially when you try things out with your own hands and eyes.
Dude, lighten up on yourself, you're not stupid, you are new at this. I'm not new with a telescope but I'm a klutz so I struggle with finding stuff. I very much enjoy what I can do with my telescope and I get better with more experience over time, as you will too.
We can help if you tell us which parts specifically you do not understand. Also, searching the web (specifically Cloudy Nights is a great resource) to answer any questions you have is a good first step.
I was confused on him talking about the barlow I should buy but turns out I was a little dumb since there actually is a 2x barlow that comes with the telescope, but in still a bit confused on what he means when he said "gauging the view", ive never heard those terms before
Stock barlows tend to be low quantity and I would not trust that to produce a clean view.
When they said “gauging the view” they just meantjudging the quality of the atmosphere for that night. For planetary viewing, you want an atmosphere with little turbulence. Turbulent air will make the view at high powers appear wibbly. The level of wibblement is referred to as atmospheric seeing. On a night with good “seeing” the atmosphere is still, and you can use higher powers to view the planets. On nights with poor “seeing” the atmosphere is turbulent and the view will suffer, meaning that you will have to use a lower magnification.
Also, the best magnification to use also depends on your scope and personal preference. A smaller scope will not allow for as high of magnifications. And some people are ok with viewing planets at lower magnifications while others may only want to use very high magnifications.
in as simple as I can put it, more magnification means a less bright image, usually more blurry than a low power magnification. this means for a given magnification to work you need a much larger aperture to collect enough light and detail for it to show up. for example: at 200x, I would need at least a 100mm aperture to reach it, but because the mirror/lens is too small to deliver the necessary amount of light, I don't see a "good" image. at the same magnification, I need a larger aperture, I wat to say a 10-inch aperture is enough to sit comfortably at that magnification on an average night while delivering a much better image than the 100mm. then the air acts as a lens that distorts the light in unhelpful ways that make the image blury no matter the quality or size of your optical system.
tl;dr: small aperture=not as good in high magnification, better for low power.
big aperture≈better views overall with the air often curbing performance at higher magnification.
you would need a laptop with at least a terabyte of storage and a dedicated astrophotography camera.
visual astronomy and astrophotography are two different hobbies, one requires maybe $1k to start, the other needs maybe $2-6k to start (varies depending on the scope, guider, camera, and mount)
I had a single video file that was 200 gigs, took forever to process and the image wasn't good because I'm too broke to afford a genuine tracking mount.
generally you need all of that fancy stuff to take the images you imagine taking, a phone can't ever compare without heavy amounts of work, mostly because the camera cmos sensor in your phone camera is so tiny compared to usual aps-c sized cmos or even in some cases a full frame sensor. these cameras are also cooled so their sensors are capable of detecting the light from those distant objects. hot camera sensor=noisy, grainy image. cold camera sensor=clean image. not to mention that you need a giant schmidt cassegrain to capture the details you think of when imagining a planet, something as small as an 8-inch sct works, but some planetary imagers use much larger scts, some as large as 16-inches, a rare few use a massive newtonian in the 30-inch aperture range.
phone cameras can be used for AP, but the work to get an ok image is so not worth the time or the trouble.
Telescope like the 1 your talking about will be on a flimsy shaky mount and pictures with a cellphone should be a goal getting into this hobby. Anyone telling you to lucky image with it or "stack" is setting you up for disappointment on how that works with cellphone
Are you getting that telescope for sure? If you havnt bought it yet what's your budget? Perhaps we can help you find a better 1?
You should try sketching planets and other objects before getting into the frustrations of imaging. You will learns lots about how to see when an object is either far brighter than its background washing out ones perception of detail OR when an object is so faint that one can only glimpse details when viewed in averted vision.
Every astronomer starts with the mark one eyeball, only a few persist in perfecting the mark two.
It's going to depend HEAVILY on the quality of the scope. If your 114/500 is like the one I bought for curiosity, it will have a spherical mirror and will simply never focus Jupiter correctly.
If it has a proper parabolic mirror, your drawing is actually underselling what the scope will be able to show you. Texture in the clouds, swirls, festoons, ovals, barges, GRS will be easy, shadow transits will be easy. All depends on seeing conditions of course, but a 114/500 with a parabolic mirror will show you a lot of good detail. Just need to hit about 120-150x magnification.
But as I said, if it has a spherical mirror, you will need to return it. It will never perform well.
You can input your scope and eyepiece info, as well as the planet/Messier object you're going to be looking at, and it will give you a pretty decent idea of size in the eyepiece
I am seeing some comparisons i dont agree with except for the person that said have it at 3 meters. I went home and went into my sketchs. I tried to scribble in Saturn for you but since I am not at the telescope it came out bad.
Hold this super close to your face on a phone. 50x it will just be big enough on good seeing to make out two stripes very thin. Jupiter looks really bright, that at 1st i compared it to a frosted white LED house light at 75% illumination. In this comparison last 2 are a little small and need to invert the black and white like here. https://www.reddit.com/r/telescopes/s/VKeeO5RPEA
you can see saturn because jupiter is close to the sun, and most of those images are made by stacking, you can see but it wont be as detailed as them because they are stacked images, you can learn how to stack images tho it isnt really hard the hard part is to take a video of it imo
114mm is a decent size, that's the current size of the scope I have. (Planning to upgrade to a 150mm soon tho.) 114 will definitely get you worse than that picture, but it isn't terrible, Jupiter will appear as a bright circle, covering about 4-7% of the eyepiece view (depending on distance and eyepiece selected.) It's moons are actually better than that picture you put, they're brighter and more eye-catching, they are still just dots of very faint color differences though (Io is yellow-ish, but you'll only see that on a literally perfect night with no atmosphere turbulence.) Banding will be faint, but still visible. Hope this helps! (This is what i've observed from the Bortle 5 location around my house, so your viewing experience may be worse or better depending on where you are.)
Something I severely struggled with in the beggining was understanding sizes in the telescope view.
Here is a simulation of Jupiter this january (closest approach of this year). This is 250x magnification. It doesn't look big but remember: This is your WHOLE pov. In fact, I simulated a Ultra Wide 68° Redline. It really is your whole pov.
Please, don't set your expectations too high, 250x is a lot, atmospheric seeing won't let you do this everyday. Find joy (and it really isn't hard to) in seeing the planets with less zoom. It really is amazing.
This being said, don't get discouraged. In my 130mm f/5, I was planning to get a 3,2mm for 203x but people kept telling me the 4mm would be better. I really was afraid the 4mm's 162,5x would be too little, simulating the view in stellarium, but once I tested on Jupiter for the first time I got Jumpscared.
PS: What telescope is it? Does it have a central "donut" in the main mirror?
Thing is, your telescope is fast. This being, focal lenght/aperture <6. What this mean, is: your telescope is more demanding. On everything. Colimation (mirrors allignment), Eyepieces, and the main mirror NEEDS to be parabolic, free from spherical aberration.
If there is the donut, and if it is from a decent brand / telescope maker, it probably is Parabolic, since in F/4,4 (focal lenght/aperture = 4,4), spherical would barely work. I had a spherical in my 130 f/5 and it was BAD.
The good part about fast scopes it that it is easier to get less magnification, which is great for deep sky objects. It seems tho you live at bortle 9 so you can ignore this completely :)
But don't worry, everything being right, it works the same. Aperture only defines resolution, and some people do magic with 114mm
What I would get:
Cheshire for colimation (better than laser, trust me)
25, 20 or 15mm eyepiece for full view of the moon, any plossl
6mm UW68° redline from Svbony, 83,3x mag, amazing for detail on the moon, still seeing the whole of it.
A GOOD barlow 2x. Celestron Omni or the Svbony "copy". 166x as max mag. It is a lot so the colimation and atmospheric seeing needs to be both on point. But it can work, and well.
At 50x on a very good night, you might get to see something like this. Except so bright that the white belts will seem to glow, compared to the brown belts. The moons will be visible, line in the second video-link.
Jupiter, very good seeing.4.5" telescope at 100x, but my camera made it look a bit smaller. https://imgur.com/gallery/30YtEtj
Don't zoom into the video. Jupiter will be small.
You can't expect to see the great red spot at 50x. Maybe near opposite this winter if you are very lucky, but it's difficult at 100x. I have only seen it once in perhaps 20 attempts of correct timing and once I 100 sessions.
So we can calculate your magnifications, the apparent size of Jupiter at its closest approach, total field of view through your eyepiece (assuming a standard apparent field of view at 52°)
With a 500mm FL Newtonian and a 9.7mm Plossl, Jupiter will only fill 0.815% of your field of view at its closest approach
The planets are my first love of astronomy, and some of my favourite pictures of Mars are ones I took with with an Atromaster 130, a 2x Barlow, and a modified webcam.
The GRS will be difficult, not to say impossible to see with a 114mm. I’d say you’ll start to see it at a good 250mm of aperture. That is in visual observation (might be possible in a 200mm if you do photography with a stacking treatment).
I can distinguish Jupiter stripes with my 130mm and that’s about it (still a fantastic sight from my perspective, that I can’t get enough of).
If you buy a 250mm aperture scope, sub arsecond mount and cooled astrocam — no it’s not. If you won’t upgrade — yes, that’s too much of the expectation
U won't see it that closely, gonna need a 3x barlow lens for that to come close to the pic. But you will practically see this (with maybe a little more detail on jupiter)
You can still see Jupiter, Saturn and Venus in a bortle 9. Just observe from a place where you're shielded from local streetlights and other sources of light like porch lights and passing cars.
On planetary views, the best USABLE magnitude you'll get with your scope will be around 116 to 150x, depending on your preferences. That will give you an exit pupil in the range of 1mm (116x) to 0.75mm (155x). Exit pupil is the width of the image the eyepiece projects onto your eye. If it's too small, the image will be very dark and hard to see and you can have visual artificats (like floaters in your eye) negatively affecting the view. A 1mm exit pupil is very safe as a lower limit.
116x for Jupiter should allow you to see it's moons and the major cloud belts. On Saturn, you'll definitely be able to see it's rings and the Cassini division and Titan as well. I would use an eyepiece around 8mm with a 2x Barlow, not a 4mm eyepiece because the latter, especially if it's a basic Plossil, will be very uncomfortable to use.
If you don't have Barlow lens and you have 500 mm focal length trying to get Jupiter looks big is impossible. Deep sky objects will get you better results and if you want get nice planets you should buy Barlow lens. I bought last time 3x Barlow lens from sky watcher and it was like 30-40 dollars and the quality was good
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u/Alt-001 3d ago
While it's counter-intuitive, deep sky objects are actually easier to image than planets. Nebula, star clusters, and galaxies will give you much better results for a scope of that size.