I’m planning to go to a rural spot that has a Bortle class 3 night sky around Southern California. Can anyone recommend a beginner friendly telescope with decent magnification for around $200? I’m not interested in using an accompanying smart phone app to go with it either. I’d like to see nebulae and galaxies the most. Thank you.
By split a gallilean moon, do you just mean see up to 4 moons separate from Jupiter? I’m pretty sure I can distinctly see them, at least with elbows on a railing or on some mount. I guess I’ll have to look tonight if it’s clear. I kinda only remember catching 3 at a time and not investigating further. I do have 20/15 vision so I guess that plays a role. Good point to remind me not everyone has my hawk eyes. I don’t catch much color though. Usually too small and washed out. It’ll have slight pink bands at best. I haven’t been able to note a crescent shape for venus, either. But I figure even cheap scopes can show my planets, so it hasn’t been my focus
Yeah, that’s what I mean. I’m impressed! For me, Jupiter looked kinda smeary, like looking at it with an astigmatism, only it wasn’t an astigmatism, it was the moons. As for Venus, I guess you might just need higher magnification to cut through the glare and resolve the crescent. The minimum power I use in my dob is 50x and you can clearly see the crescent at that power.
Alright, seeing the moons was harder than I remember with 10x50 Nikon AE. Handheld, about 80deg up. For a few moments, I could pick them out, but the shakes got too intense to see them again reliably. That’s with decent knowledge of what to expect. My memory is probably based on the one time I actually used my homebuilt parallelogram mount. Or maybe when jupiter was 30deg up and my elbows were on a railing
Hey, it’s cool that you followed up with this! It would make sense that the shaking is too intense for the fine details, especially at that high angle. I feel like I’ve heard of people using image-stabilized binos for stargazing, maybe that could make a difference?
Looking at the prices, my cheap ass would sacrifice some portability and opt for a tripod and a lightly fabricated aluminum or oak stick (read: drill 3 holes) to make a 24-36" offset mounting plank and carry a 5lb counterweight