Top Tips For Improving Planetary Views - Orion Telescopes

hello I'm Ken with Orion telescopes and binoculars and in this video I'm going to be talking about the best ways to view the planets just some tips and techniques to give you the best possible view so you don't get a fuzzy out-of-focus blurry image of the planets yet a nice sharp crisp image at higher magnifications these tips will work with any telescope right here I just for example have a four and a half inch reflector but these tips work for the smallest little sixty moment refractor all the way up to the largest reflector you can haul out with you when you go out camping all right well let's get started and talk about the planets the first step is making sure that your telescope is ready to view the planets if you have a refractor you don't have to worry about this but if you've got a reflector like this one you've got to make sure that the telescope is properly collimated all of our reflectors include a manual and in the back of the manual it tells you exactly how to do the alignment the alignment of the mirrors is critical because if it's not getting the light perfectly square to the eyepiece of the telescope here it's gonna distort the view and you won't get as good quality of an image as you possibly could it may not be so bad at lower powers but when you start to push the telescope to its highest resolution limit if it's at all out of collimation you're not gonna get a very good image so make sure it's well aligned and like I said if you have a refractor you don't worry about that that's and one nice thing about refractors maintenance-free in terms of aligning the the system but the other thing is to pick a good location if you are in a spot in the middle of a if it's a hot day like spend 90 degrees outside it's just getting dark and you're in a parking lot with asphalt there's gonna be a lot of heat coming up from the asphalt and it probably will stay warm for several hours as it cools down that's not gonna be the best view because it's like in the desert off in the distance you see a mirage that's the heat shimmering and it's distorting the atmosphere and keeping you from getting the sharpest image so best would be a grassy field at the back yard anywhere where there's not a lot of heat on the ground if you can put your hand on the deck or the concrete and you feel that it's warm you're probably not going to get the best views when you are picking a location also make sure you don't look over houses so I know that be difficult if you're in your backyard so you got to make do but if you're right next to a neighbor's house and he's got his heater going inside or the fireplace going and there's a plume of hot air coming up off of his roof that's gonna distort the view too so if you're looking at a planet that's directly over his chimney you're gonna get a terrible view and you won't be able to go to high power so try to stay away from buildings or other key sources the jacuzzi is another one if you've got a Jacuzzi in the backyard and it's pumping out heat you won't get a very good image in that area this guy so away from buildings away from concrete or hot sources and also you want to do the same thing with your telescope if you take it outside it's gonna be the same temperature as in sorry it'll be 70 degrees the mirror might be 70 degrees in the lens and it's 40 degrees outside it's gonna take a little bit of time for your lens or mirror to cool down so as it cools the mirror the lens changes shape just slightly and that's going to distort the image as well so with a little reflector like this it doesn't matter so much maybe 20 minutes and you're ready to view the best images but if you've got a larger 8 10 or 12 inch reflector it can take 30 minutes 45 minutes maybe up to an hour if it's a big heat differential between how warm the telescope is being stored inside and the ambient temperature outside so make sure you acclimatize the telescope what I like to do is take the telescope outside before dinner go in eat and then I'll know by the time I get outside it's acclimatize it's the same temperature and we'll be ready to go for observing the first thing you gotta want to do before pointing the telescope with the planets is align the finder scope it might seem like a simple thing but it's very critical if the finder is not aligned you're not gonna be able to find anything in the sky the field of view is very narrow through the telescope so allowing the finder is critical point the scope off at something during the day get a tree the top of the tree or the corner of a building centered in the eyepiece then look through the finder and adjust the little screws or adjustment screws and tell the the dot or the crosshairs right on the object that you're looking up then you're ready to observe the sky and it'll be easy to find things so when you're looking to the planets you want to make sure that you're not viewing them when they're too low in the sky when you're looking straight overhead you're look through probably less than 50 miles of atmosphere so that's the best spot in the sky because there's not as much between you and the arms you're looking at but if the planet is say 20 degrees off the horizon let's say it's just risen and it's only 20 degrees up you're looking through hundreds of miles of atmosphere versus just 50 miles straight up and the atmosphere acts kind of like a swimming pool and you're at the bottom of it when you're looking up at stuff outside the swimming pool it's all distorted right because the atmosphere is turbulent and there's air moving around so when you're looking through hundreds of miles of that turbulent atmosphere the image gets very blurry and very difficult to focus and you lose all the detail so make sure you're viewing when the object is as high as possible the general rule of thumb is just don't look at anything under 30 degrees altitude and if you can get it when it's 45 degrees or higher that's that's best to get the best view is that a really good way to determine when the planets will be highest or best best viewing locations is to use some of the astronomy software applications we've got them for laptop computers or desktops we also have them for smartphones as well so you tell it your location if it's the case of a smartphone it'll already know based on the GPS and the phone but you tell it's your location you bring up Saturn so if you're looking for for Saturn and then it'll tell you when it rises when it sets what what time the highest point the transit point for the planet is so you can fine-tune your observing location and time is based on when the software's going to tell you that it's best to view the planets the next step to viewing plan is is to get the right magnification now you don't want to overdo it you don't want to just jump right to the highest magnification possible because the the atmosphere conditions should change and one night you might be out there and you find you can't do anything more than a hundred power well that might be because the jet stream is going right overhead and the atmosphere is very turbulent and things just look really blurry past a hundred power but then maybe the next night or even just minutes two hours later the conditions might change and also everything's very still you notice the stars stop twinkling and now you can view at 200 250 power without losing that detail so you got a sort of experiment the night that you're out start with low power and start working your way up from low power to high power and tell you see hey you know that the planet got bigger but I actually sees less detail there's the cut up one you've gone too far at that magnification planets they come into their own at about a hundred power and from there on up work very well you see a lot of detail so I know strains at a hundred power very easily visible the moons of Jupiter visible at very low powers even ten power of an ocular see that but if you want to see the cloud bands on the surface of Jupiter fifty seventy five hundred power somewhere in there is great the way you figure out the maximum power that you don't really want to go past on the telescope is just to keep in mind the rule of thumb to power per millimeter of aperture so this is a four point five inch telescope that's 114 millimeters so to power two times 114 so that's two hundred two hundred and twenty something power you don't want to go past that you've exceeded the resolution limit of the telescope so always make sure you're you're below that a bigger telescope say a six inch telescope it's got more aperture that's 150 millimeters so that means 300 powers the max there you might think that that means if you have a a tennis telescope you can go to five hundred power theoretically yes if there was no atmosphere in the way but the atmosphere like I said is acting like that surface of the swing pool and it's distorting everything so no matter what size telescope you've got if it can get up to 300 power that's usually the limit the atmosphere after three enter power cuts you off and you can't really see more detail there might be rare exceptions one night a year when the atmosphere is perfectly steady and you'll find that your tenants telescope can do 400 power and you see more detail than you did if 300 but those nights don't come by very often so go to the to power per aperture limit or 300 mega magnification whichever one is lower that's that's where you want to kind of stay so don't go three in power you can figure out the magnification of your system by taking the focal length of the telescope so this one is a four a half inch telescope it's got a 450 millimeter focal length to find the eyepiece into that so 450 divided by a six millimeter that's 75 power so this eyepiece is giving you 75 power good to start looking at the planets but you can definitely do more if you add a Barlow lens underneath this it doubles the power so it takes it from 75 to 150 millimeters same thing as if you were to put a small right piece on here so this is a six if you were to put a four or it would be a three millimeter to give you 150 power that's the way to figure out the magnification if you want to just go to the limit of what the scope can do the rule of the math formula is just to reverse it so 450 millimeters divided by the power that you want so let's say 450 divided by 150 power that'll give you the focal length that you want so 450 divided by 150 power that's a six millimeter known as a three millimeter eyepiece so that would be the six plus a Barlow or just a three Mullen or a piece on its own so that's how you figure out the magnification remember don't go too much go just to enough magnification to give you a nice sharp image without overly magnifying you making you blurry and then lastly for viewing planets you can add some accessories to enhance the view of it color filters are popular for bringing out some of the contrast and seeing a little bit more detail than you did before when you're looking at the surface of say Jupiter or Saturn we have a fork color filter set that includes red yellow green and blue there they're organized by their Wratten numbers so the ad a blue filter there's a 25 red and then a yellow and a green filter each of them do different contrast boost on the planet so you can it's not like one filter works for one planet and you doesn't they all enhance different features on the planet so say the 88 blue that's good for bringing our contrast in the cloud bands on Jupiter on Mars it's good for bringing out the polar cap so you just experiment with them and see what brings out detail that you was a little more difficult to see before it won't show you things that weren't there to begin with so it's not like things just also pop out that were invisible before it's a subtle boost to the contrast so it just makes it a bit easier to see some of that subtle detail so overall a good way to enhance the view of the planets or the moon all right so there you have it several tips on observing planets at high magnification in order to give you the best possible view just keep those in mind when you're going out low-power doesn't matter quite so much some of those tips but for high-power that's the most critical difficult thing for a telescope to do cutting through our atmosphere so keep those tips in mind and you'll get great views in no time thank you very much clear skies you

Channel: Orion Telescopes & Binoculars

Views: 104,805

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Keywords: Orion, Telescopes, Binoculars, telescope, scope, space, astronomy, stars, stargazing, reflector, refractor, astro, astrophotography, moon, planets, saturn, jupiter, nebula, galaxy

Id: 8kYpTouuNAM

Length: 11min 45sec (705 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 04 2018