Excellent pictures CptTrips. If you ever find those galaxy pics please post 'em. With all of the smoke and ash here in CA, I'm sure it will be awhile before I am able to do any stargazing.
There are three telescopes and a nice pair of Celestron 10x50 binos. One 10" Dobsonian mounted Newtonian reflector that I hand built myself. F4.5 focal length. I'll post a picture of it later. My boys also have a pair of 8" Newtonian reflectors - one on an Equatorial and one Altazimuth. Bino's have a parallelogram mount with a neutral gravity swing arm. Next part is getting yourself some good eyepieces. Believe it or not the quality and type of your eyepiece is almost as important as having good telescope.
Yep. Also very very important is how stable the mount is. The best optics in the world are worthless if everything is vibrating and shaking with every breeze of touch of the focus knob. Like I said in the other post, I had take a really cheap Sear's bought x-mass scope and rebuilt a rock solid wood alt-az mount for it and threw away the eyepieces that came with it and bought a couple of decent ramsden eyepieces from Edmund Scientific and I ended up nice like scope for solar, lunar and planetary observing in the city.
Also, CT, did you see the governments (US & Canada) investigating the telescope makers on the charges of collusion and price fixing?
I'd posted maybe 14-16 years ago in here asking about telescopes and such. I finally got into a position to buy one. So I bought a Celestron Evolution 8" HD Edge scope. I just got it a few days ago. It's not even been outside yet since I bought it, as I have to pay penance to the clouds for buying it. Seems to be a week for people on another forum. Who else fesses up to such a contraption?
Excellent. Congrats.That is a perfect size if you don't have a permanent setup. Small enough not to discourage you from setting it up and big enough to really enjoy.Here is a post I made a while back about my setup: https://bbs.hitechcreations.com/smf/index.php/topic,400305.msg5305808.html#msg5305808Have fun!Wow you have a very nice setup, and beautiful pictures. I might bend your ear from time to time if you don't mind.
Anybody remember a guy named Lurch from way back when? I'm pretty sure he ground his own mirrors and stuff but haven't seen him post in ages.