New Amateur Telescope

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BR-549

Joined Sep 22, 2013
4,928
I've always wanted a good piece of glass....ever since I saw my schoolmate's Celestron in the early 70s. I never got to look at the stars with it.....he only brought a table mount to school with him. But it was a fantastic spy glass.

This says 4.5 in.......I believe my friend's was 10 in. It was the size of a small snare drum.
Back then you needed charts, tables, a clock .....to manually adjust mount........to find a target object(star).
And it really impressed the hell out of me. I believe it was a lot more than a thousand dollars.....in today's money.

I'm not sure if this enhanced field feature......is actually from the scope.......or from a library and overlaid.

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-teles...e=menu&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=item-menu
 

crutschow

Joined Mar 14, 2008
34,285
That looks like a really great improvement in amateur telescopes.
It makes a lot of sense to use electronic modern image enhancement and light integration to greatly improve the sensitivity of a telescope, and get the equivalent light gathering ability of a much larger normal telescope.
The automatic pointing and object identification makes it really simple to operate also.

Of course you could possibly get similar results with a standard telescope with an added CCD camera.
 

wayneh

Joined Sep 9, 2010
17,496
I've always wanted a good piece of glass....
Me too. My dad got us a 6" reflector when I was a kid and I enjoyed that a lot. My experience was that while everyone focuses on the glass, which of course is important, the mounting contributes more to the overall enjoyment. A rock solid mount with a good clock drive is a completely different experience than most people have with cheap telescopes. It makes no sense to spend big bucks on the optics when your limiting factor is the mount.

It's kind of like how people will spend big money on a home theater receiver and then hook it to crappy speakers.
 
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