palmer.henry•10d agoProlific Poster

That old 8-inch Dob I bought from a stranger 3 years ago still beats my fancy camera setup

I was digging through old photos last week and found a shot of Jupiter I took with that telescope from my neighbor's backyard... it had three cloud bands and one of its moons clearly visible. Last month I dropped $600 on a tracking mount and a new lens, but the images still don't have that same raw clarity. Three years ago I didn't know what collimation was, and now I spend more time tweaking software than actually looking up. Has anyone else found that their best shots came from the simplest gear?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_mason10d ago

Whoa, I gotta respectfully disagree with you there. I mean, my first scope was a cheap 4.5-inch reflector I got off Craigslist and sure, the views of the moon were nice, but I couldn't even see Saturn's rings clearly. Then I saved up for a decent 8-inch SCT and a tracking mount, and suddenly I could actually grab detailed shots of Jupiter's Great Red Spot and track DSOs without them drifting out of frame in 30 seconds. I think your old Dob just happened to be a really good one (or you got lucky with perfect skies that night) because most of the time, spending some cash on a proper mount and a sharp refractor gives you way more consistent results (especially for planets, where tracking matters a ton).

evan15110d ago

Man I feel this so hard but also not at all because my dumb self bought a 6-inch Dob off a guy who clearly dropped it more than once. First night out I literally tried to find Saturn and ended up staring at a smudge that could have been a bird flying by for all I know lol. Then I splurged on a halfway decent mount and a little 80mm refractor and suddenly planets actually looked like planets instead of blobs of light. I get that a good Dob can be magic but my wallet is still sore from the "upgrade" path so the_mason is kinda speaking my language right now. Some of us are just cursed with bad luck and need to throw cash at the problem until it works.

mason.paige3d ago

Oh hey, quick thing I gotta point out though. An 8-inch SCT on a tracking mount is a REALLY different beast from a cheap 4.5-inch reflector, no argument there. But the thing the other guy was saying about Dobs might be getting mixed up a little. A Dob is just a Newtonian on a simple mount, so if you had an 8-inch Dob instead of that 4.5-inch, you'd probably see a lot of the same detail on Jupiter and Saturn, just without the tracking. The real upgrade here is the aperture size and the mount, not the type of scope itself. Like, a good 8-inch Dob under steady skies can absolutely show you the Great Red Spot and Saturn's rings crisp, you just gotta nudge it every minute or so. So your old scope was just too small and wobbly, not that reflectors are bad.