Telescopes?

[RA_pierce]

I want to buy a telescope... a nice one for a good price.
As of now I'm set on this one:

http://www.telescopes.com/telescopes/reflecting-telescopes/celestronastromaster130eqreflector.cfm

With this:

http://www.telescopes.com/telescope...s/celestronzoomeyepiece824mm125inchformat.cfm

I'm not looking to go all out on a hobby I don't completely understand (yet), and this seems like it's a good deal on a decent scope...

Any advice or opinions would be appreciated, as well as any info from anyone who may have dealt with this site.

And will the eyepiece work for this telescope?

And... If anyone can explain things like:
What purpose do the eye pieces serve?
What part of performance do things like focal length affect?
What is an equatorial mount, how does this affect performance, and how does it compare to other mounting types?
What kind of performance can I expect from a scope with these specifications?
Is a refracting telescope inferior to a reflecting telescope (I understand how both function, but pros and cons would be helpful).

The reviews and wikipedia leave me still a little confused...

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

 

[rkcstr]

I used to be into astronomy and use my telescope a lot, but then I went to school and couldn't take it with me :-/

Anyway, I may be a little rusty and not have full explanations but here's what I got:

- Focal length primarily affects the effective magnification when using eyepieces. Higher focal length yields higher magnification for the same size eyepiece compared to a shorter focal length

-The eye pieces allow for varying magnification. Higher magnification are smaller sizes, which also means that the amount of light collected will be less and less as you go to higher magnifications.

-An "equatorial" mount means that once you have it aligned to the north star (essentially the earth's axis), simply turning one axis allows you to "track" the objects easily. If you have a motorized mount, it will allow for automatic tracking. Otherwise, you'll notice, especially with higher powers, that objects will move out of view after a short amount of time.

-I think that scope will be good enough for beginners, I don't think you'll go wrong. If you can afford it, a motorized mount would be more helpful. Some can even come with an automatic object finder, just put in what you want, it points to it. However, that takes the fun out of actually trying to find something

-A refractor has a few benefits, being it's direct line-of-sight, unlike newtonian reflectors where you're at the side of the scope. reflectors also can also have smaller apertures since all light entering (minus optical losses) makes it to your eye, unlike with reflectors which have to have a smaller secondary mirror so that only part of the total light inlet is reflected. However, the image will also be upside-down and mirrored (I think?), which makes it difficult for land viewing... some may have corrective optics, maybe? Also, you can get chromatic abberations from the optics, while mirrors can be more accurate.

-A reflector is good because they're cheaper to build big to get good light gathering capability and you get a right-side-up image. They will be difficult (or impossible) to clean if you get anything on the mirror, so keep that cap on! Otherwise, they're best for the cost-to-benefit ratio, but if you need something smaller, a refractor or cassegrain would be best.

 

[RA_pierce]

Perfect. Thanks rkcstr!
That should suffice for now... I can't wait to get my scope!