What Can You do with an 8 inch Dobsonian - Astronomy on a budget

My first telescope a family friendly Sky Watcher 8 inch Dobsonian. No tracking software just point at the sky and look.

After talking to a local Astronomer and deliberating on what to buy I finally settled on this due to it's relative ease of portability, quick setup a consideration when youngsters are involved.

Relatively easy to setup out of the box the scope on the first clear night was pointed at the moon, which immediately had that wow factor. I have taken some interesting pictures of the moon using both a Nikon DSLR using a T-Ring adapter.  However I am disappointed with the results to date.  I would advise getting used to the telescope before rushing out an buying anything else.

However this is where my DSLR journey initially has ended.  Trying to photograph Saturn although great to view with the naked eye.  Rings clearly visible assisted by a barlow lens another add on.  The 5 year old twins got their first look at Saturn and again the wow factor was achieved.


Here is a picture of Saturn taken with a hand held point and shoot through a medium power lens attached.  This is typically what you see using the scope but in a lot more detail than in this hand held shot.

Attending a local astrophotography lecture I was keen to see what I could do to push the limits of a telescope that is not designed for this work and cannot compare to the equipment used for the imaging presented in the lecture. I quickly modified a old webcam to fit my scope.  I will cover this modification in another post.  I then pointed the scope at Saturn and using my old laptop and some very poor quality imaging software which only allows video capture. I got an image of Saturn on the screen.  Due to the fact it is fixed zoom Saturn was moving quickly off the screen and required quick nudges of the scope to keep it in view but I had proven that it could be done.  Further improvements need to be made which I will post later.

The next thing was to cure the neck ache one gets when aligning the finder scope with a star at elevation high in the sky.  After considering this for some time the solution was relatively simple and I will post this very soon!

Before I sign off for now there is one additional piece of kit I have found invaluable and that is the software called Starry Night Backyard I would highly recommend this.  I have an old version  but still use it for planning and finding those deep sky galaxies. If the budget is tight then there is a lot of free software applications which do similar things, one is Celestia and a lot of amateur astronomers use it.


Another site to investigate and contains a wealth of good information is http://www.heavens-above.com/

Until next time may your skies be clear and light pollution low!

Paul