Heretic's Guide. Getting Started With A telescope.. - Astronomy.com Forums. Getting Started With A Telescope..
This is just to re-hash some of the stuff I have posted in the past. Some of which has been lost in the shuffle throughout time.. Most of this is intended for the Newcomer to Amateur astronomy, however, some may need it as a refresher or just to keep around as a reference.. There is a lot of information in this post. you would probably be better off if you print it so that you can read it at your leisure off-line and keep it for future references. Getting Started:To start with, I welcome you to the wonderful world of Astronomy. On Edit: Content of post removed. Since this post was so exceptionally lengthy for anyone to take the time to enjoy reading while on-line I decided to remove the content within this post.
Rather than you having you read through a mess of information while here at the forums, or having to bookmark or searching for it I have made it into a pdf file you can download and read at your leisure off-line. Have A Nice ... FAQ about Collimating a Newtonian telescope. "...bad collimation is the number one killer of telescopes world wide...
" Walter Scott Houston by Nils Olof Carlin (last updated March 2005, with a revised comment on the autocollimator, and June 2005, with a revised section on the 1B error). Well, maybe the questions here are not as frequently asked as they ought to be. After all, a lot of amateur astronomers own and/or use Newtonian telescopes. If you are one of us, you should ask these questions, and find out for yourself how important the answers are to the performance of your instrument. What is collimating, anyway? Collimating a telescope is lining up its optical components (lenses, mirrors, prisms, eyepieces) in their proper positions. Newtonian? Don’t worry. I have bought a telescope, and it is factory collimated. Yes, most likely. The main mirror must be held in place without stress that could bend it and change the optical figure, and cannot be rigidly held - it may shift slightly whenever you transport or shake the tube.
Africa vies for Square Kilometre Array. It will be capable of probing the edges of our universe.
It will search for gravitational waves, predicted but never detected. It will be a virtual time machine, enabling scientists to explore the origins of galaxies, stars and planets. And South Africans are at the heart of its development.