Hi all - a quick hello and a few questions from a new member

I'd say forget about taking pics right now. Just enjoy the scope for a while.

and enjoying i am very much in fact. its such a lovely hobby to have - it seems to open up so many possibilities and options to see. kinda puts you in your place when you see the expanses above.

One thing i did notice - how absolutely FULL the sky is , on a dark night, with stars. ive pointed the scope in virtually empty (to the naked eye) parts of the sky, looked through the scope and its been full of stars.

One thing i did notice - how absolutely FULL the sky is , on a dark night, with stars. ive pointed the scope in virtually empty (to the naked eye) parts of the sky, looked through the scope and its been full of stars.

That's the first thing i noticed too with my scope (and even with my new bins). Last night naked eye i could see maybe 50 stars. With the bins i could see about 50 million..................i lost count after 4653.LOL.

Hi guys, great to see new and enthusiastic blood in here!

A couple of things - Cartes du Ciel and Stellarium are different horses for different courses and for a beginner learning their way around the sky Stellarium is the easier, more intuitive and ulimately more useful product. In the end though Cartes du Ciel has hidden strengths - it can be hooked up to a GoTo scope and will drive the scope to anywhere on the map with a single mouse-click. Though not, of course, with a Skylux!

Photography and observing are very different activities though it is only natural to want to get pictures of the wonderful sights that you see. A good start is to point a digital camera through the eyepiece and snap away. This is called afocal coupling and works best with a camera with a small lens that can get close in to the eyepiece. Some means of adjusting the exposure is useful as with eg the Moon automatic exposure can overdo things by trying to average out the blackness around the outside.

Webcam imaging of the planets can be done without a driven mount so if you already have a laptop then that's an inexpensive path to pursue. There is lots of good free software to help with this - Registax is the first port of call.

Also many compact cameras, not just DSLRs are sensitive enough to create widefield images of the sky showing good detail when mounted on a simple tripod. Use of a self-timer helps let things settle down after you've pressed the button.

One rule of thumb which can be applied to astrophotography of all sorts is the length of exposure which can be taken without it becoming obvious that the Earth is rotating on its axis. Generally a normal 50mm lens is good for 10 seconds. Magniifcation reduces this time proportionally, so a Skylux at 700mm will be good for undriven exposures of about 0.6 seconds. It doesn't sound much, but the Moon, major planets and brighter stars will all be in range.

So there's a start!

Photography and observing are very different activities though it is only natural to want to get pictures of the wonderful sights that you see. A good start is to point a digital camera through the eyepiece and snap away.

That's very true. I used just such method on my 1st night with my scope and got (what i think) are great shots of the moon.

Hi Paul, I'm in Cavan too, so welcome along The scope you have is not a bad scope, I'm glad to read you've got good usage out of it so far!

Saturn won't be at it's best until february, so it's geting better over the next few weeks, don't worry about the colour so much, it's the detail that the scope can show is important, it's rings are tilting edge on, and will dissappear from view for a while next year !

Mars is close to earth now as it orbits the sun, but it is not at it's best due to distance, even when at it's best it's a small planet anyway, but do look again!

and comet holmes is in the constellation perseus right now, just look at any star map to find beta, or the star nmed 'algol', it's just above that.

Keith..