PAGE 25 2022 WINTER EDITION
How to buy a telescope By Neil Francis
So you’ve visited Perth Observatory, and experienced a small taste of what there is to see in our marvellous southern skies, and you’ve decided to buy a telescope. We’re excited for you, because you’re going to discover a whole new world! But there seem to be many options, so where do you start? You may already have looked on the internet, and found the many technical details to get lost in. We hope that this guide will help you decide what’s best for you and how you may want to use your telescope, without too much technical nitty-gritty. The first question is, what’s important to you? Are you a small person who needs a telescope that can safely be carried up and down stairs? Do you have children too impatient to give you ten minutes to locate a nebula? Or is a slower astronomy experience more your style, where half the fun is the thrill of the chase, skilfully hunting down galaxies and other faint fuzzies? Do you have a dedicated observing location that is fortunate to see dark skies? Or do you need to transport it in a car? Where will you store it? What is your budget? How interested are you in astronomy? Have a think about these things because they’re as important as any of the technical matters. We’ll come back to them later in the article. A good telescope is one that you’ll use, and not necessarily the biggest or best. We hope that your experience at the observatory has given you realistic expectations about what can be seen with a telescope. You’ve seen the bright colourful photos from the Hubble Space Telescope countless times in magazines, on TV and on the internet. Amazing images like these are approachable through a modern backyard astrophotography set up, but this is a bad place to start for a beginner as a lot of time,
money and experience goes into creating photos like that. We’ll focus on what’s seen through an eyepiece for this article, as photography is an advanced topic, and the best telescopes for eyepiece viewing are not best for photography. Most objects that can be seen by eye are very faint, and our eyes aren’t good at perceiving colour in faint objects. This means that much of the universe you see through the telescope will lack the intense colours you see in the photos. Don’t let this discourage you from buying a telescope. We think there’s magic in seeing a galaxy 50 million light years away with your very own eyes. M87 is this far away, home of the first black hole that professional astronomers have directly imaged, and currently in our early winter sky, in Virgo. The light that left that galaxy not long after dinosaurs roamed the earth has travelled for 50 million years just to touch and be absorbed by your eyeball so that you can experience it! In a sense, you’ve actually touched the billions of stars in that galaxy! And this is something that you can experience with a modest telescope. We think that much of the wonder that comes from a telescope comes from knowing what it is that you’re looking at, and not just the view in the eyepiece. That said, there are some sights best experienced through a telescope. You can see details with a backyard telescope that you may never have seen in the photos. How can this be? Well to create a photo that exposes nebulae well, in all of their glorious colour, it’s common to overexpose their bright details and so these are often lost in the photos. The Trapezium in The Great Nebula in Orion (M42) is an example of this. At the heart of M42 can be seen these four bright stars, even in the smallest of telescopes, and yet you rarely see these in the glossy photos. These
