This marks the first post here. I have always had an interest in astronomy for as long as I can remember. When I was a child I wanted a telescope and received one (I can’t remember if it was for my birthday or Christmas). I never had any success with it as a child and my interest therefore lay dormant for many years.
Now, I have recently decided to take the plunge. I have recently obtained a new telescope – a Stellarvue Triplet Apo SVX080T-3SV. I had spent a lot of time on and off over years doing research on what kind of telescope to get. Here are a few of my thoughts:
- I am a fan of the buy it for life type mindset. While knowing and hoping that in the future I will be buying other telescopes for other use purposes, I wanted to get a telescope that would not be completely replaced by another instrument.
- I live in a pretty light polluted suburban environment. I wanted a telescope that would be portable, both in terms of fitting in a vehicle with other luggage for road trips as well as hopefully able to travel by air.
- Despite being very inexperienced, I have ambitions for astrophotography. I feel like a general consensus is that an 80mm apochromatic refractor is a good choice for beginning deep sky astrophotography.
- I think the biggest tradeoff is definitely aperature. Part of me felt it may make more sense to get a more visually oriented instrument with a larger aperture and that would be a better instrument for me to learn the night skies with, but part of me wanted to get a refractor. My telescope from childhood was a refractor and I kind of see refractors as kind of the classic appearing telescope. Those may not be great contributing reasons, but that is the direction I chose to go.
In addition to the Stellarvue telescope I got the Sky-Watcher AZ5 alt-azimuth mount with tripod. I figured that would be a fairly sturdy alt-azimuth mount to put my refractor on and try to learn the night skies. I also got a few televue eyepieces which I will probably go outline at a future point after I get some use with them.
I am quite excited overall to have some solid equipment to begin exploring the cosmos.
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