A Newton telescope was not new to me. I bought a 2"/900mm in 1982, and I still own it - but had not used it for a very long time. I even connected a simple plastic camera to it and tried to take some images from M31 while manually guiding the scope blindly - well, at least I received an image of some blurry something. Then I moved to a larger city for my studies at a university, then first job, then kids....no time for this hobby anymore but with every relocation I took the old Newton with me.
In 2019, I decided to invest in a new telescope as I am now living in a house with a dark garden and some infrastructure which allows hunting for the stars again. I started looking into some of those GOTO Schmidt-Cassegrains with short tube, Alt-Az mount and was impressed by the number of objects I could automatically target with this scope. The COVID pandemic however let me abandon my plan of purchasing one, and I had the time to rethink my decision...
What makes >40,000 objects in a database interesting if most of them are only stars? Why spend so much money if there are so few objects visually observable for the eye? Wouldn't it be better and more interesting to do astrophotography? I am not saying that astronomy with an eyepiece is boring - on the contrary, it can be very exciting, especially when you have to search for an object without a GOTO-mount. I still remember the first time I saw M31 through my telescope about 40 years ago. But astrophotography (especially with narrowband filters) reveals hundreds of objects you can never visually observe with an amateur telescope.
I then started to watch out for another type of telescope. The only thing a knew was, that an Alt-Az mount will not serve my needs and that I will have to invest in an equatorial mount. I am not sure if I had stayed with my plan if I had known of...image stacking....darks and flats...guiding...periodic error correction...cooled cameras...precise polar alignment...post-processing...wavelet transforms...narrowband filtering...ASCOM...dew point...Bahtinov masks etc. etc. These things have the ability to scare a newbie. Even though I have a diploma in physics and a PhD in mechanical engineering, I would have spared all the effort - if I had known.
But I was uninformed and naive enough to start the adventure with a Skywatcher 200P on an AZ-EQ 5 mount, some eyepieces and an adapter for my Olympus DSLR camera.
(to be continued)
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