What would you expect to see with a Orion Starseeker 80mm telescope?
I’ve been studying astronomy for years and finally decided to get a telescope. I was recommended The Orion Star Seeker 80mm telescope (http://www.telescope.com/control/telescopes/goto-and-computerized-telescopes/orion-starseeker-80mm-computerized-goto-refractor-telescope), After setting it up, I tested it out by looking at Jupiter, through this telescope, Jupiter only looks like a tiny dot and you are not able to see any of its belts, is this normal for a telescope like this, or is something wrong?
Using magnification of about 120x
The above link did not work, use this one if needed: http://www.telescope.com/control/telescopes/goto-and-computerized-telescopes/orion-starseeker-80mm-computerized-goto-refractor-telescope
The StarSeeker 80mm is, in truth, a very small telescope. VERY small! At this price point, you can either get a whiz-bang computer or a really good manual telescope, but not both. You have a telescope with a quite powerful computer but extremely limited optics. It will be good for low power wide angle views of the Milky Way and large deep sky objects, but will be of very limited usefulness on the planets, which are extremely small in angular size. The eyepieces supplied give 16x and 40x, which are way too low for planetary viewing. Since you’re using 120x, it sounds like you got a 3x Barlow and are using it with your 10mm eyepiece. The problem is that, despite what the web site and catalog might say, this particular scope tops out at around 100x, and 120x is what we call “empty magnification”: it gets bigger, but no sharper.
It would have been far better to get a manual telescope with a significantly larger aperture, such as the Orion SkyQuest XT6 6-inch Dobsonian reflector, which the same money would buy. This would have given you a larger, much more detailed image for the things you probably want to see most: the Moon and planets.
Even in a larger telescope, the planets will still be small, and you will need to train your eye to see the fine detail that is there. I found that I couldn’t see fine detail in the planets until I began sketching what I saw through the eyepiece. It’s amazing how the exercise of copying what you see in the eyepiece onto apiece of paper helps you tease out the fine detail that is really there.
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