Once you’ve had your fill of the planets, it’s time to move on to some Deep Sky Objects.. or DSOs. The first place most amateur stargazers start is with the Messier Catalog. Named for Charles Messier, a French astronomer who was more interested in finding comets than in identifying the 110 galaxies, nebulas and star clusters in the catalog that now bears his name, these objects are generally considered to be the easiest to find and offer the biggest visual bang for your buck for the beginning stargazer. Some of them you can even see without a telescope or binoculars, you just need to know where to look.
For the past few nights, I’ve been on a personal quest to find two of these objects – M65 and M66 – who along with NGC 3628 form the Leo Triplet of Galaxies.
So here you can see what I saw in my eyepiece. Click the image to embiggin. The ovals are where the three galaxies should be – M65 at the bottom, to it’s left is M66 and NGC 3628 is in the upper right.
But all I could see of the three beauties was maybe a bit of a grayish blur where M66 (the brightest of the three) should be.
So there’s the rub. And here’s the secret. Viewing DSOs with a telescope in your backyard is an exercise in learning to see. You have to relearn everything you know about looking.
I’ve learned one technique called ‘averted vision.’ It’s the art of looking not directly but just slightly away from something. There’s a real scientific explanation for why this works, something about the rods and cones away from the center in the back of the eye being more sensitive to dimmer light than the ones in the dead-on center. In this case it helped me confirm that the slight haze and blur around that M9 star was, in fact, the galaxy M66. I got this buy looking away, towards the star between the three galaxies.
Tonight the forecast calls for rain and clouds so I won’t get to go outside again. Maybe over the weekend I’ll have better luck.
We’ve been live less than a week and already I’m getting email asking me what sort of telescope I would recommend for the first time buyer.
It’s actually easier to tell you what to avoid. Avoid anything with promises of huge magnification on the box. Avoid anything advertised with full color pictures of nebula and planets. Magnification isn’t as important as you might imagine with telescopes and those pictures taken by the Hubble are just there to entice you. You won’t get views that nice unless you are prepared to spend a few billion dollars.
As far as what to look for… apart from price (which I’ll get into at a later date) there are two issues at play here – size and convenience.
First off, you want as much aperture as possible. Aperture is the width of the optical tube – how much light is going into the tube and hitting the lens (for a refractor) or primary mirror (for a reflector). My telescope is a 4.5 inch reflector and on a good night I can see detail in the Orion nebula and the bands of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Sometimes even on the same night. I can see mountains and their shadows on the moon and sometimes, on a really dark night, I can see distant galaxies.
These days an 8 or 10 inch reflector on a Dobsonian mount (I’ll cover mounts at a later date) will set you back maybe $500 – $600. You’ll see plenty of detail on planets and a whole lot of wonderful deep space objects. It’ll keep you and your family entertained on many a dark night.
You can go even bigger for not much more money. But then the second factor, convenience, comes into play.
Ask any backyard astronomer what his or her favorite telescope is and they’ll tell you the one they take out every night. Sure a 12 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain on an equatorial mount gives you some great views of Saturn’s rings. But is the time to drag it outside, set it up, let the tube cool down and set up the electronic setting circles worth it? Not to mention the pain in the back from lifting all of that equipment?
So take your time. Attend a star party if you can and try out some different types of telescopes and ask around. A good place to shop online is Orion Telescopes. They have good prices and a wide selection. And don’t forget to ask questions.
If you notice a faint glow around Leo, up to Gemini, you aren’t imagining it.
It’s the Zodiac Lights.
The 12 constellations of the Zodiac run along the Ecliptic – the plane of the Solar System. That plane is filled with all of the left over dust and what not from the formation of the Planets. On very dark, i.e., Moonless, nights, you can see the sunlight reflected off of that dust in the form of a faint glow. And since the Ecliptic is pretty high up this time of year, and the New Moon isn’t for another week, this is a good time to see the Lights.
