Here's a couple of Globular Clusters, NGC 5139 and NGC104 respectively, the two brightest globulars in the sky, see if you can find them.

If your just starting out all you need is your eyes and maybe a star chart or planetarium, once you start to find your way around, able to identify a few constellations and the brightest stars and the prominent planets you may want to purchase a quality set of binoculars

Then after a while your first telescope.This will be a bigger step, so may I suggest a bit of homework here.You could start out with a 6 " Dobsonian mounted reflector, giving you a good starter aperture for minimum outlay.

Or perhaps a GOTO with simple Lightswitch technology like this little beauty from Meade.

Next we will talk about what you can see, bye for now.

 G'day everybody, I apologize for not posting this past couple of weeks, I've been away and it wasn't possible. However I'm back. Take a look at this Iconic picture of the Horsehead Nebula in Orion....... fantastic, let me know what you think.

The person who took this image must be absolutely dedicated( and well set up) it is stunning.

It's amazing it took 5000 years after the ancients discovered glass for us to fashion glass into a primitive Lens (by todays standards) then WOW, the next 500 years of development we come to the modern Telescope, with todays technology , GOTO Telescopes with precision tracking with in built GPS to enable them to find where they are anywhere on the Planet, the ability to guide themselves so that whatever you are observing stays in the middle of the eyepiece for as long as you like, great for the astro-imager, or for just looking in wonder. You will find Telescopes like these and more at astronomyandtelescopesforyou.com   so please pay a visit and return often.

A short history of the Telescope by Mary Bellis

" Phoenicians cooking on sand discovered glass around 3500BCE, but it took about 5000years more for glass to be shaped into a lens for the first Telescope. A spectacle maker probably assembled the first Telescope. Hans Lippershey(c1570-c1619) of Holland is often credited with the invention, but he was almost certainly not the first to make one. Lippershey was however, the first to make the new device widely know. The Telescope was introduced to Astronomy in 1609 by the great Italian scientistGalileo Galilei, who became the first man to see the craters of the moon, and went on to discover sunspots,the four large moons of Jupiter,and the rings of Saturn.Galileo's Telescope was similar to a pair of opera glasses in that it used an arrangement of glass lenses to magnify objects. This arrangement provided limited magnification- up to 30 times for Galileo-and a narrow field of view;Galileo could see no more than a quarter of the Moon's face without repositioning his Telescope.
In 1704, Sir Issac Newton announced a new concept in Telescope design whereby instead of glass lenses, a curved mirror was used to gather in light and reflect it back to a point of focus.This reflecting mirror acts like a light-collecting bucket: the bigger the bucket,the more light it can collect.The reflecting Telescope which Newton designed open the door to magnifying objects millions of times--far beyond what ever could be obtained with a lens.
Newton's fundamental principle of using a single curved mirror to gather in light remained the same.The major change that took place was the growth in the size of the reflecting mirror, from the 6" mirror used by Newton to the 6-meter(236" in diameter)mirror of the Special Astrophysical Observatory in Russia, which opened in 1974.
The idea of a segmented mirror dated back to the 19th century,but experiments with it had been few and small, and many astronomers doubted its viability.It remained for the Keck Telescope to push the technology forward and bring it into reality the innovative design.

When Apollo 12 astronaut Alan Bean encountered the Surveyor 3 Moon lander.

When NASA embarked on the Apollo program to land men on the moon, no one was entirely sure how it was going to work.
There were a lot of unknowns, including details about the lunar surface and how a payload as heavy as a manned spacecraft could land there. To gather data to this end, NASA launched the Surveyor program, a series of soft-landed payloads designed to find a way for the agency to safely land men on the surface.
Surveyor 3 was the second successful landed payload, and the only one to intersect the Apollo program directly; pieces of the spacecraft were recovered by the Apollo 12 crew.

The Surveyor program’s goals were three-fold: to develop and validate Apollo soft-landing technology; to gather data on the compatibility between Apollo’s landing system and the lunar surface environment; and to generally add to NASA’s scientific understanding of the moon. There were also secondary goals still in support of Apollo, like photographic imaging of the moon to help scientists pick the right landing spots for the manned missions.
The Surveyor spacecraft all followed a basic design. The main body — on which the power, communications, propulsion, flight control, and payload systems were attached — sat on three hinged landing legs fitted with shock absorbers to soften the impact of landing and wide footpads. The whole lander was a little under 10 feet tall and weighed a little over 2,260 pounds at launch. When the spacecraft landed, having burned through their fuel using retrorockets, the spacecraft weighed just over 650 pounds.

For its mission, Surveyor 3 had a few design changes in line with its unique goals. Unlike the previous Surveyors, this third spacecraft was fitted with a television camera, a soil mechanics experiment, and instruments to measure the surface’s temperature and radar reflectivity. After making a soft landing, the spacecraft was designed to take television pictures of the surface and gather data on the surface’s bearing strength, radar reflectivity, and thermal properties.
Surveyor 3 launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on April 17, 1967, atop an Atlas-Centaur rocket. After a brief hold in Earth orbit, the Centaur restarted to send the spacecraft on a course for the moon. It arrived three days later on April 20. Just over 47 miles from the surface, traveling at 8,615 feet per second, the retrorockets roared to life and slowed the spacecraft to a gentle 450 feet per second. Descent continued, monitored by Doppler and altimeter radars.

A few seconds before landing the radars lost lock; scintillations from the landing site interfered with both systems. The guidance system switched to an inertially-controlled mode that stopped the retrorockets from firing, so after the spacecraft touched down it lifted back off the moon. It touched down a second time, but the continuously firing retros meant it leaped off the surface again. Finally, on the third attempt, the spacecraft settled softly, slid about a foot in the dust, and came to a rest on a 14 degree slope inside a crater in the Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms. Within an hour the first images were taken and within two days the surface sampler tool was used.
Surveyor 3 lasted through a full, two-week long lunar day, finally going silent after lunar sunset on May 3, 1967; the spacecraft never woke up after the two-week long lunar night. Over the course of the mission the spacecraft spent 18 hours, 22 minutes digging small trenches in the surface and gathered 6326 pictures. It also gathered a wealth of new data on the strength, texture, and structure of lunar material, all of which was remotely sent back to Earth.

But the last remote transmission wasn’t the end of Surveyor 3’s mission, nor was it the last interaction NASA scientists would have with the spacecraft. On Nov. 19, 1969, Apollo 12 touched down less than 600 feet from Surveyor 3, an incredibly precise landing on only the second lunar landing mission.
Commander Pete Conrad and Lunar Module Pilot Al Bean visited the spacecraft on their second moonwalk. They examined Surveyor 3 and its resting site, photographed the spacecraft, and removed about 22 pounds of hardware to bring back to Earth. Among the recovered pieces was the TV camera, which is now on display at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
The whole Surveyor program saw seven spacecraft built and launched to the moon for a total cost of $469 million. The program amassed a wealth of incredibly valuable data that played no small part in supporting the Apollo program. Both Surveyor 3’s mission and Apollo 12’s were considered complete successes by NASA.

More about starting out.

The Maksutov-Cassegrain telescope design has basically the same advantages and disadvantages as the Schmidt. It uses a thick meniscus-correcting lens with a strong curvature and a secondary mirror that is usually an aluminized spot on the corrector. The Maksutov secondary mirror is typically smaller than the Schmidt's giving it slightly better resolution for planetary observing.

However, the Maksutov is heavier than the Schmidt and because of the thick correcting lens, it takes a long time to reach thermal stability at night in larger apertures. The Maksutov optical design typically is easier to make but requires more material for the corrector lens than the Schmidt Cassegrain.




Telescope Mountings

Now that you have learned about aperture, power and the different types of telescopes, let us discuss an often overlooked but very important aspect of using a telescope - the mountings. Remember that shaky view is all it takes to kill your enthusiasm! And a good mount can enhance your views. There are two basic telescope mountings:

    * The equatorial and
    * The altazimuth.

An Equatorial mount is designed so you can easily track the motion of the sky as the Earth turns and its motions indicate celestial north south and east west in the eyepiece. This is a great help when you're trying to find your way among the stars with a map. The Altazimuth mounts are simpler and just swing up, down, left and right. You have to move the scope along every so often to follow the stars, moons and planets. An altazimuth mount is both cheaper and lighter for the same degree of stability, advantages that are offered by an equatorial mount design.





You and your telescope

Whichever telescope you pick, choose one that will meet your precise needs and hobbies. The planets, the Moon, and close stars require high power, good contrast, and sharp resolution, and if these are the objects of your attention, a refractor or reflector is probably the best bet. While very faint objects like galaxies and nebulae need a huge aperture and you should invest in a big reflector telescope to view these. And if you haven't specialized, an all-purpose midrange telescope should serve best, for example a 6" or 8" reflector or an 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain.

Continuing with starting out in Astronomy.
Designs of Telescopes


Even among telescopes with the same aperture, some designs are more portable, others give sharper images while still others are more economical. There are three basic kinds of telescope to choose from depending on your specific requirements.

    * Reflecting telescope,

    * Refracting telescope, and

    *Catadioptric telescope.

All these 3 telescopes have the same light-gathering properties, despite their differences in size and weight. They also have a similar purpose, to collect light and bring it to a point of focus so it can be magnified and examined with an eyepiece, but each does it differently. Consequently, each type of telescope has its pros and cons, which you can match with your observing needs.




1. The Refracting Telescope or Refractor

Refracting telescopes are the most common form of the telescope - a long, thin tube where light passes in a straight line from the front objective lens directly to the eyepiece at the opposite end of the tube.

    Advantages
    * Easy to use and consistent due to the simplicity of design.
    * Good for distant terrestrial viewing
    * Excellent for lunar, planetary and binary stargazing especially with larger apertures
    * Sealed tube protects optics and reduces image degrading air currents
    * Rugged, need little or no maintenance

    Disadvantages
    * Generally have small apertures, typically 3 to 5 inches
    * Less suited for viewing small and faint deep sky objects such as distant galaxies and nebulae
    * Heavier, longer and bulkier than equivalent aperture reflectors and catadioptrics
    * Limited practical usefulness
    * Good-quality refractors cost more per inch of aperture than any other kind of telescope.



2. The Reflecting Telescope or Reflector

Reflecting telescopes use a huge concave parabolic mirror instead of a lens to gather and focus the light to a flat secondary mirror that in turn reflects the image out of an opening at the side of the main tube. You look through an eyepiece on the side of the tube up near the top.

    Advantages
    * Easy to use and even construct
    * Excellent for faint deep sky objects such as remote galaxies, nebulae and star clusters because of their larger apertures for light gathering.
    * Low in optical irregularities and deliver very bright images
    * Reasonably compact and portable
    * A reflector costs the least per inch of aperture compared to refractors and catadioptrics since mirrors can be produced at less cost than lenses

    Disadvantages
    * Generally, not suited for terrestrial applications
    * Slight light loss due to secondary obstruction when compared with refractors
    * The tube is open to the air, which means dust on the optics even if the tube is kept under wraps
    * Reflectors may require a little more care and maintenance




3. Catadioptric Telescope

Catadioptric telescopes use a combination of mirrors and lenses to fold the optics and form an image. Catadioptrics are the most popular type of instrument, with the most modern design, marketed throughout the world in 3 ?" and larger apertures. There are two popular designs, the Schmidt-Cassegrain and the Maksutov-Cassegrain.

In the Schmidt-Cassegrain, light enters through a thin aspheric Schmidt correcting lens, then strikes the spherical primary mirror and is reflected back up the tube to be intercepted by a small secondary mirror. The mirror then reflects the light out an opening in the rear of the instrument where the image is formed at the eyepiece.

    Advantages
    * Most versatile type of telescope
    * Best near focus capability of any type telescope
    * First-rate for deep sky observing or astrophotography with fast films or CCD's
    * Excellent for lunar, planetary and binary star observing plus terrestrial viewing and photography
    * Closed tube design reduces image degrading air currents
    * Compact and durable

    Disadvantages
    * More expensive than reflectors of equal aperture
    * Its appearance may not be suited to everybody's taste
    * Slight light loss due to secondary mirror obstruction compared to refractors