Sure, all the fancy &#8220;Go To&#8221; stuff gives you a chance to see a lot of objects your first few nights out, but then what. When it&#8217;s all over you know nothing about the sky and you&#8217;re out of sites to see. I believe go to technology can greatly aid the experienced observer, but as a starter it&#8217;s just too much of a crutch. Spend the money on the optics; force yourself to learn your way around the sky. After using my 8&#8243; dob for  <span><a href="https://casazza.net/Home/index.php/astro-equipment" class="readmore">Continue reading &rarr;</a></span>{"id":161,"date":"2014-05-29T19:36:15","date_gmt":"2014-05-29T19:36:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/casazza.net\/Home\/?page_id=161"},"modified":"2025-01-01T19:45:30","modified_gmt":"2025-01-02T00:45:30","slug":"astro-equipment","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/casazza.net\/Home\/index.php\/astro-equipment","title":{"rendered":"My equipment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Sure, all the fancy &#8220;Go To&#8221; stuff gives you a chance to see a lot of objects your first few nights out, but then what. When it&#8217;s all over you know nothing about the sky and you&#8217;re out of sites to see. I believe go to technology can greatly aid the experienced observer, but as a starter it&#8217;s just too much of a crutch. Spend the money on the optics; force yourself to learn your way around the sky. After using my 8&#8243; dob for 2 short years and I still had a lot left to learn.<\/p>\n<p>That said, my second scope was a goto scope as is my current (third) visual scope. I have seen many wonders of God&#8217;s creation that I couldn&#8217;t find with my dob, but that does not mean there is no longer any challenge to find an object, it is now more a matter of refining my skills as an observer and not having to worry about if I am even looking in the right place. \u00a0I now go out and study a small area of the sky in detail. Trying to see every Deep Sky Object (DSO) in the area.<\/p>\n<p>I still maintain that a 6&#8243; or 8&#8243; dob is a good first scope. Any smaller and you will be disappointed, any bigger and you might not use it. Once you have a scope for a year or so you will know how much set up and tear down time you are willing to accept.<\/p>\n<p>My current \u00a0equipment consists of:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Solar viewing\n<ul>\n<li>Coronado Personal Solar Scope<\/li>\n<li>TMB Planetart II SW 9mm<\/li>\n<li>GSO Superview 15mm<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Public programs and light polluted skies\n<ul>\n<li>Celestron C11 GPS with XLT coatings<\/li>\n<li>Baader Hyperion Mark III zoom 8mm to 24mm<\/li>\n<li>f\/ 6.3 focal reducer<\/li>\n<li>Moonlight motorized focuser<\/li>\n<li>UltraBlock Narrow band filter<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Dark skies\n<ul>\n<li>20&#8243; Star Master f\/4.5 with Sky Engineering goto and tracking<\/li>\n<li>Nagler Type 5 31mm<\/li>\n<li>Ethos 13mm<\/li>\n<li>Nagler Type 6 9mm<\/li>\n<li>Nagler Type 6 5mm<\/li>\n<li>Siebert Optics 1.5X Barlow<\/li>\n<li>OPT ED 2X 2&#8243; Barlow<\/li>\n<li>O III filter<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Astro Photography\n<ul>\n<li>Orion EG-G (now rebuilt as a Sky Watcher EQ6 PRO) mount<\/li>\n<li>Explore Scientific ED127<\/li>\n<li>ZWO ASI2600MC (primary camera)<\/li>\n<li>Orion Short Tube 80<\/li>\n<li>Altair GPCAM2-130 (guide camera)<\/li>\n<li>ZWO ASI220MM-MINI (for solar imaging with the PST)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"page-templates\/content-sidebar.php","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-161","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/casazza.net\/Home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/casazza.net\/Home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/casazza.net\/Home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casazza.net\/Home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/casazza.net\/Home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/casazza.net\/Home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":743,"href":"https:\/\/casazza.net\/Home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/161\/revisions\/743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/casazza.net\/Home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}