Thread: Astronomy
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Old 12-06-2007, 09:36 PM   #18
N7OQ
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Location: Yuba City, Ca
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What Greg said is right on the money. My Orion Nebula is the color that the camera took but the Lagoon nebula had been enhanced for red because the Canon camera had a IR filter and it causes red to look purple when I decide to buy a new camera I will then modify this camera by removing the IR filter but then I can only use it for Astrophotography.

If you want to get into Astronomy I would suggest getting a good pair of Binoculars first and a good star chart. You can see so much with a pair of binoculars and I never have a viewing session without them even with my scope. My binoculars are 7X50. Don't buy department store scopes if they sell it by power then it's probably not a good scope. I use my lowest power eye piece more than any of the more powerful eye pieces. Like Greg said most nebula's look like a gray or light green smears, I enjoy star clusters the most and there are so many of them to see.

One the things that happen to a lot of people getting into Astronomy is they get aperture fever they keep buying bigger scopes until they become much trouble to setup and then they just collect dust. I think that anything above 10" starts to get hard to handle, I have a friend who has a 12" scope and He said he used his 6" scope more often and his 12" is collecting dust because it is so heavy.

For visual viewing the scopes Greg have are the best in my opinion they have the best price to size and so easy to set up you can be viewing in minutes. I could write a book here but there are much better ones already written. Like Ham radio you can spend a lot or a little and you can also build your own scopes.
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