So I went over to Bob's place after work today and we hauled out his 14" LX200GPS SC telescope. That thing is a behemoth. And the new features for auto-alignment are amazing. It uses a digital level, a digital compass, and a GPS to figure out where on the planet it is and how it is oriented, then takes that information into account when pointing towards a known celesital object.
We set it up, turned it on, and let it do its thing. We didn't have to level the tripod or point it north or anything. We came back in 10 minutes and it was ready to go. It pointed towards Vega and asked us to adjust the view to center the star, then another guide star, and after that, it could slew to any object in its database automatically and would more or less perfectly center it. It takes all the annoyance out of telescope use.
Because we were using it in his small backyard, we didn't have a great view of the sky and other than Andromeda, I couldn't identify anything that we could see. So we set the scope to give us a tour of "Tonight's Highlights" and it picked things that were out right at that moment and relatively high in the sky and gave us a tour. We saw the dumbell nebula, the ring nebula, some open and globular clusters, Uranus and Neptune, and a host of other stuff. And it only took a few seconds to go from one to the next. This telescope is awesome.
However, even with a top-end "prosumer" telescope like the LX200GPS, I still feel a little let down by the fact that pretty much everything you look at aside from planets and bright stars in a telescope is black and white on account of your eye's bad sensitivity to low-luminance color information. So I really want to get my camera hooked up to this thing and try some tracking long-exposure stuff.
Bob bought a piggyback camera mount for the scope that should show up sometime this week. I have a 28mm (45mm equiv.) f/1.8 lens that has superb optical quality with which I can do relatively wide shots (e.g. entire constellations) and today I bought a 50mm (80mm equiv.) f/1.4 lens that will let me do closer-in piggyback shots. For doing prime focus and eyepiece-projection work for really long-focal length shots, I'll need to buy some more adapters and that comes later. First order of business is wide shots of large nebulae and constellations.
Early on the morning of December 7th, Jupiter will pass behind the moon. We won't see it disappear here, but shortly after the moon rises we'll see Jupiter pop out from behind the dark edge. I'm considering renting a bigass lens from a camera store in Santa Fe to capture the event.
