New to astronomy, looking for help identifying a scope that would suit me best

[Bradley H]

You can take pictures of the moon and planets. I've got a 8" dob and took this last full moon. With a camera at the eyepiece


Took Saturn with a £4 webcam that I got of eBay

I'm still learning hope it helps

[Russ_16v]

What great pictures!

[KeithBC]

Dump the idea of a film camera unless you have infinite patience and a $1,500 mount

I second that!

I missed where you said it was a film camera. Forget that! There is no way to focus a film camera. Most of us focus with a Bahtinov mask, using either live view or test shots. Film cameras don't do live view, and test shots on film have a significant turnaound time! The ground glass of an SLR viewfinder does not show the diffraction pattern of a Bahtinov mask, so your only focusing aid is your Mark 1 eyeball. Frankly, I don't know how the old-timers did it.

Without the ability to stack frames in software, the only way you can do long exposures is with long exposures, which requires fancy and expensive guiding equipment. Using digital cameras and software, you can take a multi-hour photo as a series of 2 or 3 minute exposures, significantly reducing the difficulty and cost of precision guiding.

Besides, pretty soon, it will be hard to find film.

[linkizzl]

I know AP will take time to master, but I would like to be able to start somewhere. My main fear is that I will buy an 8" dob, and then grow bored if I can't do much more than look. I'm not saying I know that is going to happen, I am just saying I'm a 20 year old kid in college, I know it is a possibility.

I have been reading a book, I forget what it is called off the top of my head, but it is decently good. I know there are probably better books out there to teach you about the practice of astronomy, but this book goes more into the physics of the universe which, although it is dumbed down to probably a high school level, I am still learning a lot from it and find it very interesting.

I have a very good laptop, as mentioned before, I am a nerd. So I am sure I can download whatever software I would need onto this beast be able to fly. All that other stuff, yeah it is going to be expensive but hopefully in the end it will all be worth it. I am going to go to a nearby star party in a week or two to see other people's set ups, and I'll really be using that experience as my main backing knowledge when looking to buy a telescope.

Jennifer, you mentioned getting a wedge, and I've heard that phrase thrown around either here, or on other websites and forums that I have been looking at, and I am still not sure what that does. I have tried googling it, but all the information about a wedge that I can find assumes some background knowledge on what a wedge does, so starting with 0 knowledge I have learned nothing about a wedge.

[KeithBC]

A wedge goes under the mount to tilt it, so that an alt-az mount becomes an EQ mount. It presumes that the software that runs the motors is smart enough to be told that it is now running an equatorial mount and to calculate accordingly. I think that most mounts these days can handle that.