Everything About Telescopes

intial set up costs:

market research
your designer fee
price of demo model and demo modelers fee
patent

marketing and promotion, easy peasy with forums
but
the need to consider price of manufacture and then numbers expected to sell and see if there if after all that is considered it could be made at consumer friendly price. What do you think?

 

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then there is the competition duplicating, would be best I think to sell your idea to one of the large corporations that are already engaged in the business of selling astronomy gear. you could make it, patent it and then take it to them.

Get a good comission

 

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Starry Night is highly recommended, even for kids. For free:

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/

 

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Got a link or is it hush-hush?

 

Is is part of Reagan's Star Wars program? Semi hush-hush-hush or just hush-hush-hush?

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Detailed, for sure. But, I wonder how lasers are 'wired?'

 

radios are wired with 'printed' circuits. they are actually etched but we call it printed. lasers are of two types, solid state and gasous tubes, neither of which are wired.

 

After lurking on one of the software forums for years, I noticed that the (oddly named, I thought) sciforums.com actually had science forums... so I figured I'd wander in and say hi.

One of these days, I'm going to get myself a modest reflector, probably something in the 4.5" department from Orion or whoever. Nothing major, partly since I live in the very rainy city of Hilo, Hawaii, and partly since more I spend a lot of time around slightly larger ones at various places I work and volunteer.

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I've also recently (within the last year) gotten into doing some nighttime photography with my DSLR on top of the local mountain, but I don't have a tracking mount, or a telescope to fasten it to, or anything like that, yet.

 

Lately I've been pretty interested in space. Many times I just look up at the stars for a time. I've never had a telescope and I was wondering, if I were to get one, which I should get? I live in the suburbs next to New Orleans, so I generally only see maybe 3-5 stars and sometimes 7 when you squint your eyes. After Katrina, when the city had no power, I was simpley amazed at the sky, I saw anywhere from 25-50 stars. Thats when I began to get really interested. But now you really cant see the stars anymore. I dont know which is better. Deep space or Lunar and Planetary. I really dont know which I would prefer, or which is better for my surroundings. I live 2 minutes walking distance from the levees, and I probably could set up my telescope there and look over the lake, where there is no light, to see a few more stars. I also saw that link to the lens that gets rid of most light polution. That interested me a lot. Does anyone have a good suggestion for a non-expensive telescope for my needs?

 

about the only thing a telescope is good for is veiwing the moon and planets and the occasional comet. stars in a telescope are the same as naked eye veiwing except there are more of them.
i would invest in a pair of high power binoculars and get away from urban areas.

 

Provita

It would depend on whether or not you want to look at deep sky objects or lunar and planetary objects. With the former, you'd need the largest 'light bucket' you can afford, most likely a reflector style of telescope, which is usually the cheapest way to go. You'll need fairly dark skies, which means traveling to remote regions away from city lights. You can use a reflector for lunar and planetary but they're not usually recommended due to their short focal lengths.

If you strictly wanted to do lunar and planetary and aren't too keen on packing up your gear and heading out of town all the time, then a small refractor would do the trick. A few companies have been coming out with some relatively inexpensive yet decent refractors, made in China and Taiwan, using ED glass (Extra-low Dispersion.) An extra expense for a refractor is a decent mount, which you can purchase either an Equatorial or Alt-Azimuth mount.

Of course, save a bunch of money for the accessories you'll probably need.

 

Well, I deeply prefer viewing the stars at home. But I dont want it to be too heavy cause my front yard has a much bigger view than the back. Considering there is a lot of light around, especially since right above me is a street light, I guess I will have to go w/ the planetary and lunar. Can I still get a decent look at stars? Or just the 8 other planets and the moon? Is there ANY chance in seeing deep space objects by filtering out the light polution and not having to go miles out of town?

 

Even with your eye to a telescope, you still have to deal with the fact that the human eye registers about one percent of the light striking it, on an instantaneous basis. That's why astronomers don't look through eyepieces, doing long exposures with CCD's instead.

Find yourself a digital camera with reasonably high ISO capabilities (ISO 800 or 1600) and long exposures (15-30 seconds); put it on a tripod or on the ground with the Milky Way overhead, and have it take an exposure (a remote release is good for this, if you have one) and you'll get a feel for how much is really out there.

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to be honest i never owned a telescope but i did have a pair of high power binoculars.
the only thing i found of interest besides the moon and planets was the andromeda galaxy. the binoculars i had was powerfull enough to give pretty good detail on such an object.
as to stars i could never resolve them into nothing more than point sources.

 

You should try running through the brighter objects in the Messier catalog... there's some wonderful star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies that you should be able to see fairly well.

There is a list of which can be found with a moderate pair of binoculars here: Binocular Messier Club

I haven't done any stargazing for a few years, but from memory I think that at this time of year you could spend a fair bit of time just in Saggitarius, with the triffid nebula, the lagoon nebula, half a dozen globular clusters, and as many open clusters pretty easy to find with a reasonably dark sky. It's a full mon at the moment I think, so this week is not a good time for deep sky stuff.

 

I was thinking of picking up a Meade 14" LX200GPS ,it seems to be superior to its previous models. How much would you pay to go for a telescope that would give you the best possible clarity? and what would the ideal spec's for that telescope be.

 

Vega, clarity is going to be influenced by a lot more than your scope. How's the light pollution where you are? At what elevation will you be observing? How's the humidity, and how much preciptable water is there above you in the air column? Do you know the average seeing?

I would rather have an Orion XT 4.5 dobs on Mauna Kea or Atacama than even a 16" LX200 GPS SMT in, say, New Jersey. (And I've used both of those.)

 

Give me a Hubble in orbit anyday. You just can't beat the resolution.

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Well... I won't call the word "resolution" completely meaningless in astronomy, but you've got spatial resolution of the sensor, you've got plate scale (pretty closely tied to spatial resolution), you've got actual pixel count, and you've got seeing.

Hubble, of course, doesn't have to worry about seeing.

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But its highest-resolution sensor array is 16 megapixels (PanSTARRS, by comparison, will have 4 sensor arrays, each of one gigapixel, and Canada-France-Hawaii's currently operational MegaCam is over 300 megapixels), the spatial resolution of its sensors doesn't go much below .024 arcseconds/pixel (meaning that even if the seeing is better than that, it can't actually image any sharper than that) and .024 arcseconds/pixel just isn't all that unattainable by large (8-10 meter) telescopes equipped with adaptive optics and/or Keck-style visible-light interferometry capabilities.

Throw in that Hubble's only got 2.5m of mirror, limiting its light-gathering capabilities a fair bit, and, well, I'll just keep wishing for a visible-light version of JWST.

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Has the Canada-France & Hawaii telescope taken any good Eagle Nebula shots lately? If so, it's show time.

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