Buying the universe

Thanks largely to many recent successes by NASA, astronomy news often finds its way into the general press. This inspires some people to buy backyard telescopes so they can have a look-see at the heavens. If you are playing Santa this year, you, too, might be tempted to buy a telescope.

The good news is that we’re living in a golden age of amateur telescopes, thanks to a flood of high-quality, mass-produced scopes on the market.

The other news is that buying a telescope requires some research. Don’t hip-shoot for a telescope, you’ll probably miss the mark by a wide margin.

When it comes to research, the go-to guy for this is Ed Ting. He’s the author of ScopeReviews.com. The “Beginners Advice” page of the site is a great starting-off point.

Here’s a quote from the site, and the emphatic capitalization is from the original text: “Avoid department store, toy store, and ‘Nature/Science’ store telescopes. I cannot restate this strongly enough: STAY AWAY from department store telescopes!”

Got that, Santa?

That observation jibes with my experience. This year I encountered several people who bought, or who were given, scopes from department stores, discount stores, or big box stores, and none of them were happy with the experience.

Well, we’ve covered what not to buy, which leaves us with the question of what to buy.

I’m going to skip a lot of general information here; I lack the space. So let’s just boil things down to another quote from Mr. Ting’s site: “If I were pressed to recommend one telescope for beginners, it would be the Orion Skyquest XT8.”

I’ll back-fill some information there, since it helps us pry open the telescope world. “Orion,” in this context, is a respected brand of telescope, and the company does a lot of direct sales via their website, Telescope.com.

The SkyQuest XT8 is a model from Orion in which the main optical element (a mirror) is eight inches in diameter (that’s the “8” in “XT8”). This scope lists for about $360. The tube of the scope is 46.5 inches long, and the whole affair, the tube plus the mount (base) it sits in, weighs 41 pounds.

The arrangement of this scope is called a “Dobsonian” design. In pure terms of what you can see through the eyepiece, Dobsonian telescopes deliver the most bang for the buck due to their simplicity. Well, nothing is ever simple in telescopes, but some things are simpler than others.

I’ll note that we’re talking about “visual” astronomy here, the old-school method of putting a hairy eyeball up to an eyepiece and taking a look. By contrast, you can put a camera up to the telescope, but that is a different realm entirely and far beyond the scope (ha!) of my screed.

In this epoch in which even telephones have GPS embedded, it won’t surprise you that many telescopes have electronic guidance and tracking, some of it quite sophisticated.

Other telescopes, including many (but not all) Dobsonians, are strictly manual propositions, where users often use charts to help them point their scopes to the desired target. This is called “star hopping” and it’s how I get around using my 10-inch Dobsonian.

Telescopes, like field artillery, are measured by their bore diameter, or, to put a bigger word on it, their “aperture.” A telescope is really just a big funnel that you hold up to your eye. Only in this case, instead of gathering liquid, the funnel gathers light. The wider the mouth of the funnel is, the more light it gathers. And the more light it gathers, the more stuff we can see.

So the big concept here is not magnification, but is, instead, light-gathering. And that’s why telescopes are referred to by their sizes (apertures).

As for Saipan’s case, we have some things to consider. For one thing, I’ve never found the local skies to be very clear, which puts a bit of a blanket on the astronomy thing, but maybe that’s just my experience and you see things differently. For another thing, shipping costs are a bigger deal that in the mainland, so if we’re talking about large packages that weigh a lot, it will require opening up the wallet.

On the other hand, opening up the skies has never been as affordable as it is now, so there’s no use derailing anyone’s ambitions based on the fact that not everything is perfect. At least you don’t have to stand in the snow to use a telescope on Saipan.