My first telescope the Skywatcher Star Discovery 150i and the first night out with it

 Newly arrived to my blog? Want to know more about me before you dive into my posts? Why not visit the home page first and start your exploration from there: 

https://undersouthwestskies.blogspot.com/2025/01/welcome-to-my-new-astronomyastrophotogr.html

And welcome. 

Welcome to 'UnderSouthWest Skies'. Thanks for stopping by. I hope you find the experience worthwhile. This blog post has been written from my own 'beginner perspective' after doing lots of reading on  various basic astronomy and astrophotography topics of interest to beginners.  In getting my head around it all, I may have got odd bits slightly wrong; but, like you, I am on a leaning journey, so please forgive any unintentional errors.  Also, just because I have gone down a particular road regarding equipment, doesn't mean that I have chosen the 'CORRECT' route!  This particular post below is a good example - in hindsight - I might have chosen a different telescope and mount to start with. But in a mad rush of over-enthusiasm.........

Meanwhile, clear skies to you. Take care and thanks for visiting   Steve aka PlymouthAstroBoy 

This blog was written a few years ago, sometime around 2021,  and published on my Arwen's Meanderings  and 'wherenexthun' blogs. I have now transferred it here to my new UnderSouthWestSkies site. 

My new telescope finally arrived last week. It has been stuck on a ship - trapped in the Suez Canal! No seriously, it has! 

Anyway, it is a Skywatcher Discovery 150i GOTO newtonian telescope with SynScan app on smartphone to control its movement and access the database. It duly arrived in two boxes, one containing the optical tube assembly and the other - the tripod, eyepieces, and single arm GOTO mount. I also got a red dot finder and a metal tray to sit between the tripod legs. 

Regular readers will know that I have taken up astrophotography and astronomy. My intention is to do them both when out on overnight up-river voyages in Arwen, my cruising dinghy. There are one or two lovely, relatively dark sky, spots up the Lynher and Tamar and on gentle breeze days I might take either the Ioptron skytracker pro or the telescope with me. I am just working on how to safely keep them waterproofed and securely stored out of harm's way in Arwen. There again I might only take the skytracker as that is lightweight, small and portable.  (You can read about that by referring back a couple of posts).

The telescope will also travel with us in our Motorhome Bryony! 

So, over the last few nights of clear skies I have been down to a local beach spot where the light pollution from the city is less. I can sit in the boot of the car, with the boot door raised above me and have telescope and ioptron tracker set up on tripods outside.

It has, putting it mildly, been an interesting learning curve these last few nights. A good job I am a life long learning fan! Thus far, I have made some simple basic errors but had lots of fun and some good learning experiences:

• tripping over the tripods or knocking them when moving around - I am innately clumsy
• not getting the tripods level at the start
• not adjusting and calibrating my phone correctly so that the GOTO mount was out in its own tracking of stars and galaxies - that was a frustrating hour and a half trying to work out why the telescope pointed 90 degrees away from the object I had commanded it to GOTO 😕
• forgetting to set my phone to a red night setting, so every time I referred to one of the apps - it lit up bright white and ruined my night vision, which I had spent the last 30 minutes building up
• not calibrating the skytracker correctly so that the 200 x 2 minute photos I took were all out with elongated stars - that's over two hours of my life I won't get back again 😭
• watching the power cable from the powertank to the GOTO mount, wrap itself around the tripod as I made the telescope change various directions - that was a cable knot that took some sorting!
• not being able to set the camera and lens to the correct orientation because the first ball head mount I used was too small and unbeknown to me, kept slipping during the three hours that I tried to take photos with an intervalometer 😩. That was 400 photos into the digital waste bin!
• trying to get my head around the various eyepieces and how to use them in conjunction with Barlow lenses
• trying to remember and recognise the key constellations and marker stars

Lesson learned - do just on thing on a night - either visual astronomy using the big telescope OR astrophotography using the tracker. There will come a time, I am sure, when my poor brain will be able to handle both on the same night, but it isn't now; nor the foreseeable future based on last night's performance! 

Last night my neighbours in the car park proved entertaining. For several hours they had a small BBQ between their two converted campervans. It was full of dancing orange flames and they sat around it singing, playing sitar music and the bongos and chanting. It got fairly wacky but chilled around 12.20am when one of them continually tried to get into their van without opening a door. When she passed out, I wasn't sure whether it was due to drink, concussion or the copious amounts of weed consumed. Either way, her companions carried her into the van and all seemed well. They put out the BBQ fire and everything was quiet for the rest of the night.

Millennials eh? Such lightweights! In bed by 1.00 am!

 

So why did I buy this telescope? 

I'd read a very review of it in a 'Sky at night' magazine article. 

So a few details: 

1. a 150mm aperture, focal length of 750mm - F/5 focal ratio - so it will work for planets and deep sky gazing
2.  with the 25mm eyepiece that gives a magnification x30; the 10mm piece gives x75
3. mount is powered by 8 AA batteries or a 12v power tank plugged into a power port. It is a single Alt-az type. Quite sturdy looking and held onto the tripod by three bolts. 
4. the mount is driven by a syn-scan app on my smartphone which gives access to a database of celestial bodies as well  
5. the red dot finder is a zero magnification one which sits atop the optical tube
6. the tripod is strong aluminium and well made
7. to start it up - the telescope is set to level and pointing north; I then carry out a 3 star alignment procedure  

One of the things that attracted me was the GOTO capability. I could do some visual astronomy immediately and not worry about having to navigate complex star charts. I was told that using a smartphone attachment piece I would be able to image the moon, Pleiades and the Orion Nebula, although so far, despite my best efforts, this hasn't happened yet. But I think it is more to do with my smartphone!  Similarly, although told I could link my telescope to Sky Safari on my smartphone, I have yet to work that out. there is a setting for it in the mount but I have yet to find it. 

There is a port on the mount for adding a synscan hand controller should I want to but actually I liked the idea of using my smartphone to drive the scope. Switch on the mount and it creates its own wifi network. The synscan app, as I said earlier, has a great database. 

The optical tube assembly is quite light and easy to transport off the tripod, which I quite like. 

Concerns: well immediately I think that it is unlikely to reach focus using my DSLR and I am not convinced that the focuser tube could hold the weight of a canon 800D anyway. So proper astrophotography is out, but I sort of knew that already! 

Look, I know its a beginners telescope - but that's what I need at this moment in time. The videos below helped me a lot. For the budget I had, I think its a good start. I don't know whether astronomy will become my new passion or not - so not breaking the bank and then discovering I don't enjoy it - were major considerations in my choice!