I could have posted this in the where can I find? subforum but I think it fits better here.
I don’t really know which one I want and how much use I’ll make out of it, but I don’t want to spend a fortune and if I can go second hand that would be great. Something that has caught my attention is that Celestron, which seems to be a strong and/or popular brand, doesn’t come up that much in ruten, or it does but because of the eBay bastardization of the search results.
I’ve done a bit of research and apparently Celestron scopes are produced by a TW company: Synta Technology Corporation of Taiwan - Wikipedia
which also sells these:
Sky-Watcher - Wikipedia
which do appear on ruten.
I have some very powerful Celestron binoculars (15 X 75), with which i have been very happy for many years. the rubber is perishing a little in the humidity here, but the lenses are great. Not quite as sharp as Nikon, and with a tiny bit of chromatic aberration in bright light, but ten times less expensive…
so i’d recommend them for lens telescopes as well, i guess.
unless you like a mirror telescope, which for anything more serious is the way to go for both home and professional astronomer alike.
observatories
shooting ranges
hmmmm how about buying in Taiwan?
I know Danshui used to have this store that was a discovery type shop, that sold telescopes. But honestly given the amount of light pollution in Taiwan and the haze, what would you really see? Maybe if there was ever a major blackout in Taiwan you could see everything…
Perhaps the best night skies I’ve seen in my life were from mountains in Taiwan, on the different cross-island highways.
And on clear nights like right now (well, not now now, but “summer now”), I figure Jupiter and its moons, and Saturn and its rings, would be pretty cool to look at, even from Taipei.
OP said nothing about viewing the night skies… XD
Drones with high magnification works better for that kind of sightseeing…
Light pollution can nowadays be mitigated through image post processing.
With a telescope, the full potential can really be reached only with the use of a digital camera or imager, not with the eyes. It is already true with a simple digital camera vs naked eyes.
Taiwan’s Sequator is a very easy to use free software.
Try to shot the Milky Way without EQ mount in urban area
Left: original single 10 sec, the Milky Way is almost invisible, stars are faint
Middle: accumulated 12 frames, total 120 sec. Very heavy light pollution
Right: reduce light pollution by the uneven filter of Sequator. Before any post-processing
Here another example with comet C/2022 E3 ZTF:
Details:
C/2022 E3 ZTF and Meteor. At 2:58 am on January 31, 2023, on a high mountain at an altitude of 3,000 meters, a brightly colored meteor just crossed the comet ZTF. It’s so beautiful! Details: Canon R7 with Tamron SP 24-70mm F2.8 Lens Using Sequator156 to superimpose 40 consecutive photos without tracking. Single photo: focal length 70mm, f/2.8, exposure 13.8s, ISO16000 Total exposure time: 13.8s*40
