This sounds quite interesting. I’m considering buying a telescope for this occasion (we moved out of the city and I’ve been thinking about it for a while, the sky is always so clear around very).
What would you recommend as entry level beginner telescope? Is it worth observing all this via a telescope?
A good pair of binoculars will be sufficient. You didn't need a ton of light gathering capability for casual planet viewing like this.
Telescopes are a bit of a rabbit hole. Many cheap mass market telescopes are also known as hobby killers. A 6" dobsonian (reflector) is a good starting point for deep space objects like nebulae and star clusters. For planetary viewing Schmidt-Cassegrain telescopes are great.
However, learning to use a telescope requires time and patience. Taking it to the field for an event like this for the first time may be frustrating as you will be spending most of the time figuring out how to collimate and align it.
I certainly don't mean to discourage you from getting one though.
A good pair of binoculars is much easier to use. They require no collimation out of the box and show an upright image that makes it much easier to navigate the sky, at the cost of reduced magnification and light gathering capability. You will be surprised how many celestial objects even 10x magnification reveals that are invisible to the naked eye.
My brother started at "I'll just buy one telescope" and last I checked has just finished constructing a powered observatory on some remote land where the telescope and rooftop motors can be operated entirely remotely through cell connectivity. This is a worse hobby for your wallet than having a boat.
That’s pretty normal tack. It’s just most people can’t get there vs not wanting to. A not insignificant amount of money is required to get to that point. It costs nothing to have the desire though
Someone else did this, then built 20 more next to it. Now it's a business where they sell telescope time to researchers and hobbyists. I imagine it's profitable for them.
Binoculars are a bit misleading though as most people tire of trying to keep hold of them and track steadily. If you’re going to the level of getting some sort of mount/tripod for the binocs, you might as well step up to a telescope with GoTo features with tracking.
> Will a picture from a wide angle lens actually show the planets?
Yes.
> I thought planets just show up as a bright dot in the sky.
Correct. :)
There's no real way to get around that geometry problem, you can either see several at once but they're pinpricks or one at a time but potentially somewhat more clearly.
To add to this, I'll try to give an idea of how much zoom (or focal length really) you'd need to get a picture with detail.
I took photos of both Jupiter and Saturn w/ a Canon R7 and the RF 100-500mm lens, with a 1.4x extender. The 1.4x extender make the lens act like 700mm instead of 500mm. The R7 being an APS-C sensor adds another 1.6x factor, making the combo the equivalent of 1120mm. In these photos the planets are still just dots. The camera takes 32.5 megapixel photos. When zoomed in to the pixel level, both planets were still tiny, about 50 pixels wide. It was enough to see Saturn had a ring and some color striping on Jupiter, but that's it.
The iPhone main camera is like 26mm (42x less zoom). The iPhone 13 Pro's telephoto lens is 77mm (14.5x less zoom), and the iPhone 15 Pro Max is 120mm (9.3x less zoom)... so you're unlikely to get much more than what looks like an out of focus few pixel wide dot even on the zoomiest of iPhones, but with that wider 26mm lens, you just might be able to capture them all in one shot.
To me, what's more technically impressive than the fact I took pictures of the planets with readily available camera gear was that I did with 1/125s shutter speed, handheld, standing in my yard. The accuracy of the image stabilization needed to pull that off is what astounded me the most.
Yes, but they will show exactly as you thought with the exception Mars will be a noticeable red dot. Uranus is usually too dim to see though. Usually to photograph Uranus and Pluto requires multiple nights worth of images to align and see which dot moves between the images. That moving dot is the planet
A $200 6 inch / 150mm reflector with the eyepiece on the side is a decent backyard starter scope. You can see the moons of Jupiter, Saturn's rings, the crescent shape of Venus, and nebulas. Ask your local library about the local astronomy club. Someone may have a >200mm scope.
I agree with the other recommendation to go with binoculars for your first foray into assisted sky viewing.
Another point in favor of binoculars for people living out of the city is that places out of the city often have more wildlife. Binoculars can be great for observing that.
When choosing binoculars there are a couple tradeoffs. Binoculars are listed as M x D, where M is the magnification and D is the diameter of the lenses in mm. For M here are some considerations:
• Bigger M makes things look bigger.
• Bigger M also reduces the field of view.
• The smaller the field of view the steadier you will need to be able to hold the binoculars to keep something in the field of view. A magnification of 15 for example would probably be useless for most people who are not using a tripod and trying to keep a flying bird in view. Actually it would probably even by hard with a tripod. But for looking at something that isn't moving (or whose apparent motion is very slow like a planet) 15 might work by hand and would be a piece of cake with a tripod.
For D some considerations are:
• The bigger the D the more light the lenses gather, letting you see dimmer objects.
• The bigger the D the more the binoculars weigh which makes it harder to keep them steady without a tripod and tires you out faster.
Another thing you might want to consider is the "close focus distance". Binoculars can focus on things from the close focus distance to infinity. For binoculars meant for astronomy the close focal distance can be 50 feet or more. Not a problem when you are looking at the Moon, but might be if you want to take a look at a squirrel frolicking in your yard.
Binoculars meant for wildlife will have a much shorts close focal distance. For example I've got Celestron's Nature DX 8x42 binoculars [1] and their close focus distance is 6.5 feet.
What would you recommend as entry level beginner telescope? Is it worth observing all this via a telescope?