Star Gazing
I am sure I’ve mentioned Ipoints before; well, I recently managed to have enough for £80 worth of Amazon vouchers. Thats’ quite a few books, but having recently signed up for a short course with the Open University to teach us about astronomy, we decided to put this free dosh towards a telescope – a Celestron 114 motorised, don’t sniff, it’ll get us started and it cost a whole £22 with the vouchers applied!
We are lucky enough to live very close to the Vectis Observatory, so we hope to be able to use their, rather more expensive, equipment when we understand things a little better.
The new toy should arrive this week so expect a few more posts..
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Update: I decided to cancel this order from Amazon for a couple of reasons.
a) Amazon are taking an age to get the thing into stock and
b) The experts at the astronomy club reckon anything less than about £500 is not really worth having and will be disappointing after a couple of outings.
Oh well, I have £80 in vouchers stored at Amazon for other use and plenty of decent kit to use down at the observatory..
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I think your friends at the astronomy club are correct for the most part, although I’m not familiar with current costs for mounts in the UK. I paid $500.00 USD for a used Meade LXD55 through Hands On Optics http://www.handsonoptics.com and lucked out receiving a VERY good and solid mount which works flawlessly. They check each item, used and new before shipping and provide additional parts should they think certain bits may deteriorate as the equipment was used. I thought that was a cool customer service provided without my having to ask. At any rate, used mounts come available from time to time and if you check out the used sections of some astronomical equipment retailers, sometimes you may find a huge bargain. Hope this helps.
jonathan
Thanks for that Jonathan.
Still busy learning my way around the kit at the observatory but am slowly beginning to get a handle on what I am likely to see – it’s mind-boggling stuff for a beginner!
Everyone at the club is very helpful (and patient) and I can see this becoming a major interest.
Brian