Loading…
31
A guy at a star party near Flagstaff handed me his 8 inch scope and I finally got why people fight about aperture
Last month I drove out to a star party about 30 minutes outside Flagstaff and a guy next to me let me look through his 8 inch Dobsonian. Up till that night I had only ever used my little 4.5 inch starter scope from my backyard, and I honestly thought the difference would be small. He pointed it at the Ring Nebula and I could see the donut shape clear as day, while in my scope it had always been a fuzzy gray smudge. He told me the darker sky out there was doing half the work and the extra mirror was doing the other half. Now I'm looking at dark sky maps on my lunch break trying to find spots within an hour of my house. Anyone here made that jump from a small scope to something bigger, and was it worth it or did the light pollution in town just eat the gain?
0 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In0 Comments
No comments yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this discussion.