Common Mistakes To Avoid

foreign welcome back to the channel thank you so much for joining me now occasionally when we start anything new whether it's a hobby a job or whatever we do make mistakes now some of these mistakes can be costly and they do say that you can learn by mistakes but it's always best if you just get started right in the first place so what I've done is I've just put together a few pointers just to point you in the right direction to get the very best out of the night sky and your telescope now this refers to cleaning your telescopes Optics or should I say over cleaning you see if you over clean telescope Optics you can actually do more harm than good telescope mirrors and lenses only very very occasionally need anything more than a good blast of air and this is your best friend when it comes to cleaning Optics now this is just like a bulb air blower it just blows a little jet of air you can get this in compressed air forming an air in a can if you like I wouldn't recommend that but for their environment and all that like wipe of paper something that's free and all the way around you but one of these I'll last you for years and years and years and whether it's a refracting telescope or a reflecting telescope if you can get down that is to the to the mirror just a quick blast of air is all you're going to need you see telescope mirrors and lenses have a very fine coating on it sums for enter reflection Sons were just a protective coating but this is an incredibly fine coating and you can quite easily take that away with abrasive rubbing you know any kind of rubbing so if there's a little bit of dust on your lens of your telescope don't worry about it it's not going to interfere with your overall views same goes for the mirror mirrors have to be in incredibly bad shape before you can even consider cleaning one um I mean I've had this telescope oh it's probably four or five years and I've cleaned the mirror once so as long as you keep your dust covers on when the telescope's not in use then that's all it's going to need you know you like once in a blue moon basically to clean your mirrors um now the real they are apps exceptions to this um if you do live in a climate that's very dusty for instance you have a very dry climate and there's big dust clouds everywhere then obviously you're going to accumulate a lot more dirt than than normal another example would be if you live on the coast we all know what Sea Air can do to Glass you get that milky um sort of uh film that gets onto glass with the high salt content in the air so in those cases um which are pretty extreme you may need to clean your mirrors and your lenses a little bit more off so remember less is more when it comes to cleaning Optics just a quick blast of air is all you're going to need now one thing that is important to do before you start observing is to let your telescope climatize to the air outside now it's a a pretty bad mistake actually to actually take your telescope straight from a warm house outside now whether this is summertime or winter time it really doesn't matter you've got to get you the the air inside the tube of the telescope to match the air of the outside if you don't what's going to happen is you'll get thermal wobbles the warm air hitting the colder air is going to cause that wobble effect that you see when the heat rises now you then insert your eyepiece and this is gonna actually your eyepiece won't magnify this even more you're simply not going to get good focus and the image like I say will just look like you're looking underwater really now with telescopes of say this size now this is a five inch reflector I would give it a good 30 minutes before before you actually start using it anything bigger than five inch I would give up to 40 minutes to an hour to let the telescope cool down now it's always a good idea to actually remove your dust covers remove all your dust covers that have no eyepieces in this will allow the airflow to circulate around the telescope a lot quicker cooling it down a lot quicker now this also applies to refracting type telescopes like this um now these can sometimes take a little bit longer to climatize but what I do is I always take out everything now the the diagonal and the eyepiece so leave leaving an open end in the tube like that allowing air to circulate around inside the tube it's going to cool the telescope down a lot quicker so don't forget anything bigger than five inch uh you're going to you want to leave it a good hour anything smaller something like 30 to 40 minutes will be fine but always let your telescope cool down for your best views of the night sky now if your telescope is in one on one of these type amounts which is called an equatorial mount it really is important to actually use it as it's designed to be used now what I mean by this is I I have heard over the years of some horror stories of how people actually use one of these things there is a slight bit of a learning curve they are really easy to to actually get to the hang of using an EQ Mount but you must use it correctly an equatorial Mount doesn't move up down left right like a um like a normal camera tripod say they're actually moving an arc an arc form um and it this can kind of confuse the new newbie to these uh to these mounts and I've heard all kinds of horror stories like people actually using the uh locking nut that's on the telescope and actually using that to to use the to have the left and right um motion on on the telescope scope and and even using the altitude um locking nuts on here which which sets your your altitude and using that for the up and down please don't do this your telescope is going to fight against you you're not going to get the full benefits of an equatorial Mount now I have done a quick start guide to using an equatorial Mount I'll put that I'll leave that link in the description um but once you get to used to using an EQ Mount you'll never go back to an altaz again uh the up down left one right one they're incredibly useful and they are designed to make life a lot easier so if you're not using this correctly you're going to make life hard for yourself and you're really not going to get any benefit from an equatorial mount now astrophotography has become incredibly popular over the last few years and it's one subject or one part of astronomy that has a complete new learning curve now I've seen this happen to quite a few astronomers where they've jumped into astrophotography far too quickly and they buy all the gear they spend a lot of money on it and it's been a hobby killer basically to them they've just sort of gave up uh and they don't want to do astronomy anymore now this is a crying shame I don't want this to happen now I'm not saying that don't do astrophotography but what I would do is take baby steps into astrophotography before you actually start buying all the gear for it and a good start is the mobile phone you can take some great photographs these days with just the aid of a mobile phone try that first see how you get on with see if you enjoy it because believe me just using a mobile phone takes a little bit of time and a little bit of a learning curve just with a mobile phone then maybe move on to a cheaper sort of Astro camera uh SV Boney do a very affordable camera and this is gonna be a good Gateway into using you know a real Astro camera if you like because with that you're going to need to use computer software you're going to have to learn the programs and and various stacking methods and the rest of it but start off low and do baby steps trust me folks I've seen it happen to too many people where they've just got overwhelmed with it all you need an incredible amount of patience time and Deep Pockets and uh a lot of cases when it comes to Astro photography so please don't jump in at both feet on the Astro photography side of things there's a lot of brilliant and amazing things you can do with just your telescope and an eyepiece so appreciate I always say appreciate the telescope learn your way around the night sky uh things like that for a good 12 18 months before you even think about starting to take for photographs of the night sky but like I say try it with your mobile phone first again I've done videos on this how to even take photographs of deep Sky targets with your mobile phone so uh jump onto my library on uh instant tips I think it is on my section have a look on there and you'll find some videos on how to use your mobile phone get some great photographs but please please please don't go spending hundreds and hundreds of pounds and finding out you don't actually like astral photography because it does happen more than you can imagine now in astronomy we've got you've got to learn to love the dark now what I mean by this is is to get your eyes into night vision mode or your eyes to be adapted to the dark um you know what it's like if you're fast asleep and you turn the light on and oh your eyes are like that well that's because your eyes are not dark adapted uh you may have noticed that sometimes when you first walk out and you look up you can see lots of stars then all of a sudden as the night goes on you can see more stars well it doesn't mean that there's more stars appearing it simply means your eyes are getting used to the darkness and your pupils are open up and the the rods all the rods that pick up all the um this more sensitive uh parts of our eyes start activating and it's really important to get this going now this can take up to about 30 to 20 to 30 minutes in most people to get properly and fully dark adaptation now it's always a good good idea if you can at all possible to actually sit in a dark room before you know a good half an hour before you actually start going out to out in the night sky now this is really only important if you're going to be doing deep Sky astronomy um if you know you're looking for those faint faint uh objects in the night sky if it's just the moon or the planets that you're going to look for it's not uh totally necessary but it's always a good idea to get you to get your eyes into that night vision mode to see the more finer details in the night sky now you may have heard that red lights are a good choice and they are um I've got one here uh it's just a head torch with a red light on it but as you can see this is really really bright and it's far too bright for the night for maintaining your night vision so a good idea is a couple of layers of brown parcel tape if you just put some brown parcel tape over the the front of the lens of uh whatever it is a torch head torch whatever this is going to really dramatically cut down that red light um really a red light torch is only wants to illuminate what you want to see basically so if you're using a star chart or something like that you know it's it as you can see this is far far too bright um I use this for walking actually dog walking so we're in the winter but uh yeah a couple of layers of brown tape that's all you're going to need keep that night vision down also a good idea is to leave your mobile phone in the house if at all possible mobile phones are terrible for ruining your night vision remember 20 to 30 minutes to get your eyes totally uh into night vision mode uh so if you get a phone call or you look at your phone that's unitevision gone in an instant be prepared always get everything ready that you need are for a night's viewing because if you come indoors that's it again your night vision has gone so get yourself organized try and sit in a dark room for like I say a good 20 minutes before you go outside well don't forget you need to call your telescope down anyway so while your telescopes cooling down sit in the dark room get yourself ready and finally turn expectation into appreciation it's something I said on a video years ago and people said I need to put that on a T-shirt and I think they're right because you see today we are spoiled with the internet and everybody expects to see fantastic amazing pictures of galaxies details in planets and the truth of the matter is even in large telescopes planets nebula they really look quite small in the eyepiece um did of course you can see detail of course the bigger the telescope the more detail you're going to see but they are not anything like a photograph that you will see on the internet so and it can be quite disappointing to a lot of people when they first buy a telescope because that's what they expect to see and if you as soon as you can um to cancel all that out and just appreciate what you're actually seeing through the eyepiece of the telescope you are going to appreciate the entire night sky and this hobby so much more you've got to remember the targets that you're looking at if you're looking at a nebula you're actually looking back in time it's taken literally thousands of years for that light to reach your eyeball so remember to an expectation into appreciation so there you go folks just a few little pointers to point you in the right direction and don't forget to have a look at my tips and tricks and hints and all that that I've got in my on the main page of my channel I'm sure you'll find some more things on there that are going to help you uh get the very best out of your telescope and the night sky now before I leave I just want to say a special thank you to all the super thanks that I've been getting over the last few months and I'm gonna make a special exception now any super thanks that I do get I'm going to give you a special shout out because I think you deserve it I can't tell you how much I appreciate them and how much it helps if you're not quite sure what a super thanks is if you look just below uh my channel you'll see like a money symbol and that's just to say AJ I liked the video here's a drink on me and like I say I really really do appreciate it thank you to each and every one of you you know you are who've already sent me super thanks like I say I can't thank you enough well that's it for another video folks thank you so much for joining me and uh don't forget like share subscribe especially hit that thumbs up button that's the one that really does help me out in the meantime folks go and enjoy the night sky and I will see you on the next one bye for now foreign

Channel: Small Optics

Views: 14,200

Keywords: astronomy, astronomy for beginners, astronomy for dummies, the stars, the planets, the night sky, sv bony, skywatcher, telescopes, star gazing, the moom, astronomy tips, small telescopes

Id: KAQoESUrrFo

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 12 2023