Question about Telescopes and PC's

NeVeR

Hi.

I'm looking to get a telescope of my own and would like some advice on it.

I would like one with GoTo controls, Also i wanted to know can i connect a telescope to PC and take photos/screen shots of what i see,

Can you contact the movement of the telescope from the PC?

I love the stars/space and want to see more of it.
Any help would be great
thanks.

slade_x

NeVeR wrote:

I would like one with GoTo controls, Also i wanted to know can i connect a telescope to PC and take photos/screen shots of what i see,

Can you contact the movement of the telescope from the PC?

With go to controls i think you'll be best served to choose between celestron and meade which offer competitively priced goto mounted telescopes.

With such a package you are paying mostly for the mount system and the tube assembly comes second.

Meade have without a doubt grabbed special attention of their own thanks to their ETX range; http://www.meade.com/etx/index.html
because of their sheer portability, even for the largest offering.

All in all no goto system is absolutely perfect and never 100% accurate (finding exactly what you want to find with 100% accuracy i mean). However their slew controls are absolutely marvelous. when you switch to manual control you can use cursors on the control pad to slew the telescope around, without actually having to touch the telescope, which is one of the reasons that its absolutely marvelous.
Even the sturdiest of telescopes will be prone to minimal amounts of shaking when touched to move it. The goto drive practically eliminates this as you dont have to touch the telescope while your observing


A goto drive mounted telescope describes just a computer controlled mount. you can control the telescopes movement from a pc, but you will have to look through the eyepiece to view

There are however accessories like Meade's Electronic Eyepiece which will allow you to view whatever is in the telescopes field of view on a tv or a pc with a vivo graphics card.

I have never used one so i sadly cannot comment on their quality, you can be almost guaranteed though that they are low resolution and without a doubt will not give you as crystal clear a view as actually looking through an eyepiece will.

I suppose they are somewhat novel though, with respect to being able to sit back in a chair while you control the telescope from your field laptop and viewing everything on screen

NeVeR

thanks for all that info.

I'm thinking about getting the meade etx90 looks nice.

Thanks again,

squonk

I have a Meade LXD-75 6 inch Newtonian with autostar (that's goto). I've found it good but it can be a bit quirky. Admittedly I'm new enough to the field myself so still very much learning but it takes a while to get used to the set up of the scope initially and I'd highly recommend getting your hands on some star maps or some software to get yourself familiar with the night sky. Goto only works well if it's set up properly and if you sometimes don't know what star the handbox picks, you can be in for a bit of trouble. By and large though I've no complaints.

What's worth saying but not overly relevant for most of us is that Meade primarilly support PC's and, specifically, Windows. I use a Mac for my laptop and had a bit of trouble getting the cable to control the autostar recognised by the mac. This was because the mac didn't deal too well with the USB to serial connector, which is what you'll need to use probably if you have a newish laptop that doesn't have old style serial ports. You'll be grand in Windows I'd bet though. Even so, I've figured out what the problem was with my mac but by that time I'd decided to get a bluetooth controller instead and I'm having mixed results with that at the moment. Meade's software to update the autostar is also Windows only which is annoying.

The 6" NEWTONIAN can be a bit of a handful to lug around so if you can get one of the etx's then go for that. I think the LXD series scopes are cheaper though. If all you're doing is taking the scope out into the garden then one of the smaller LXD scopes isn't so bad.

squonk

One thing I forgot to mention in the last post is that setup for photographic purposes is a bit complex so don't expect to get taking snaps straight away. Also the equipment for that is a bit more expensive again.