FatiTankEris t1_iugmvxu wrote on October 31, 2022 at 4:17 AM

Reply to comment by scorzon in A three hour time-lapse of Jupiter I took with my 10 inch telescope by J3RRYLIKESCHEESE

I looked up, and it seems to be around $2500 or so... But it depends on where you buy, and if there are used parts.

scorzon t1_iuh6tri wrote on October 31, 2022 at 9:00 AM

Cheers, I got excited when I saw the notification for your reply on my phone, as it truncated that figure to $250 😁

Still $2500 seems very reasonable and these days would be some £2500 I expect. I just need another £250,000 on top of that to afford the upgrade to a house in a dark skies part of the country 🥴

FatiTankEris t1_iuhb6u6 wrote on October 31, 2022 at 10:06 AM

Well, at least planets don't need dark skies. Can be seen during daytime.

scorzon t1_iuhmvpg wrote on October 31, 2022 at 12:22 PM

Now see that's what I mean, I'm interested but without any domain knowledge. Of course you don't need amazingly dark skies for the planets, that never occurred to me. Thanks for the steer.

Out of interest what would the OP likely see with that kind of setup when training the lens on some nearby stars. Other than our own sun of course 🤭

FatiTankEris t1_iuj5ig8 wrote on October 31, 2022 at 6:50 PM

That depends on what's sensing the light at the end, your eyes or a camera. If the eyes, then it would look like the night sky, but with stars everywhere. Nebulas would look like grey clouds in the stars. One has to remember that they'll always be pinpoints though, because they're too far away, but some multi-starsystems might resolve separation between stars. If you're using a camera, then what can be seen is increased a lot, an exposure of 2 seconds can reveal colour too. But the sky is moving from our view as our Earth rotates, and under magnification, that's faster and trails out exposures, so a counter-rotating mount with a motor becomes required. It allows the view to remain perfectly still and to take longer exposures of the stars, allowing much deeper views with colours. Such a big telescope usually can't fit on consumer Equatorial mounts like that (10" is quite huge), but a 6" can. Usually smaller telescopes with better mounts are used for DSOs (Deep-Sky Objects). Best is to look on r/astrophotography and r/telescopes (there's a pinned buyer's guide), there you'd see many impressive Deep-Sky Objects captured on even smaller telescopes, about 3", their price usually comes from the EQ motorized mount and camera. A great starter is an 8" reflector dobsonian. The larger the aperture, the greater the resolution and light collection. That's a balance of size and power, so to speak. Planets require large aperture, but no motorization, DSOs require a motor-Mount, but can be shot on smaller optics as well.