Townsville Astronomy Group

You may think about astronomy for awhile and then one morning you wake to the idea of scope ownership and what a great idea it is, but!!!  There is a whole heap of things to be considered before you take that step towards purchase of your optical device.
Firstly, is it a knee jerk reaction – have you recently viewed the galaxy (or a very small portion of it) in a friends ‘super’ telescope, possibly a 10-12 or 14” or maybe viewed a television documentary on the universe or some such.  Please don’t get me wrong, in fact, join the club.  Most of us start off in a similar fashion.  You must however, realise that the image you were looking at was through a large aperture telescope or enhanced for TV and you won’t achieve that same image quality in a smaller instrument, or at least not immediately.  My first telescope was indeed a ‘Tasco’ 60mm Refractor with a small battery motor on the RA Axis and when I eventually learned how to align it correctly on ‘Celestial South’ – the views of the Moon, Venus and Jupiter etc. simply blew me away.  It wasn’t long though before my 60 odd year old eyes were yelling at me for a larger aperture device, which came along in the form of a ‘Skywatcher’ of slightly larger dimensions.  My new scope was a 130mm, 1000mm Focal Length Newtonian which I enjoyed to the fullest.
Suddenly my targets were clearer and the objects I viewed were larger and I reckon more detail was evident in the eyepiece.  You can now see where I’m heading with this but more about my experience later.

Questions abound regards its origin and most of them remain unanswered at least with any clarity or in a way that would make sense to the ordinary person.  The dedicated stargazer at least starts to achieve some albeit, minor understanding of the vastness of what lies outside our super delicate atmosphere.  In our small way with our study of the closer galaxies and nebulae we begin to understand how stars and planets in all their many and varied forms come to exist and for how long they endure in the hostile environment in which they spend their long lonesome lives.

In comparison if indeed one can be made in this case we the human race have been in existence for less than a blink in time and there is every chance that we won’t make it for as long as the shortest lived one of the abovementioned stars or their remains (the nebula) which I might add is one of our main targets to view at this point.