Re: Recommend a telescope (i'm so confused!)

From: Charlie Hubbard (chubbard_at_owt.com)
Date: 01/13/05 

Date: Thu, 13 Jan 2005 08:45:30 GMT

On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 15:45:51 -0500, "Stephen Paul"
<spaul219@hotmail.com> wrote:

>Funny thing.... last night I just wanted to
>take a quick tour of objects at well known locations, which is a perfect
>task for the 4" refractor. But, I didn't want to carry out the GEM and
>battery, and go through the alignment proceuder, so instead I pulled the GEM
>head off the tripod, popped on the UniStar Light altazimuth head, attached
>the 4" refractor and went out to poke around. Believe it or not, that swap
>procedure takes less time than setting up and aligning the GoTo. ;-)

I don't have a "goto" scope so I may be missing something. However, I
did have a fork-mounted SCT on an equatorial wedge for years and years
and very rarely did I ever do a decent alignment. When in a hurry, I
just plunked down the tripod with the wedge aligned "northish" and
started observing. This was perfectly fine for visual work and only
required moving the RA slow-motion knob to track the object (with an
occasional DEC adjustment as the object drifted north or south off
center because of the poor alignment). On those occasions were I took
the time to plug in the clock-drive, only a small DEC adjustment was
required every 10 minutes or so to keep things centered. This was
nice if there were other people waiting for a look. My point is,
equatorial mounts are still useful without going through the time
consuming alignment procedure. There's no reason to move to an alt-az
configuration, is there? Just don't bother doing a good alignment!

That said, there were also many nights where I just set the scope base
directly on an old kitchen table I kept outside for the purpose (i.e.
no tripod). In that configuration things were alt-az but I didn't
have to mess with the tripod and it made it convenient when taking
notes or making sketches. That worked for a single observer but
wasn't so great with a casual observer around just because the manual
tracking was more complicated.

>The main point of course being that if you are under the gun to get outside
>and poke around for a half hour or so, nothing beats having some knowledge
>of where to look...

No arguments there! A working knowledge of where objects are in the
sky or at least how to find objects using an atlas and a finder is
definitely worthwhile. I've never used a "goto" scope but I have been
drooling after one for a while now (it's cool technology!). My
sneaking suspicion though is "goto" is a neat, high-tech toy that
would be fun to play with for a few nights but, once the "new" wears
off, the money might be better spent on a little more aperture
instead.

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