Orion Nebula through TS 70

Here is an image of the M42 Orion Nebula taken from the Travel Scope 70 with a Nikon D3100. I still have to find a mount with a motor drive so I can do long exposures and avoid the star trails.

 

The Orion Nebula (M42/NGC 1976) is also known as "the Great Nebula." It is a bright magnitude 4 emission nebula that is located in the middle of the hunter's sword (second of the three star looking points below the belt of Orion). The great wings of gas curve away from a glowing mettled core, lit by a quadruplet star system known as the Trapezium (hard to distinguish from the image above). Trapezium, easily seen in telescopes as a trapezoid of four close bright stars, is located at the heart of M42. It is a multiple system of newborn stars - a large collection of young stars and protostars called the Orion association. M42 is accompanied by a smaller detached nebula M43 (NGC 1982) which glows northeast of the nebula.

Here is a Hubble image of the Orion nebula:

AstroEscapades

During the long weekend I went up to my home town - Baguio City. I checked the weather for Baguio City using weatherspark which was introduced by Dr. Lee in the October meeting of the ALP. The weather was good for that week and my classmate in astronomy, Vanessa, was able to do some observations when she was in Baguio before me. Also, John Nassr from Baguio had wonderful images recently posted to his website.

Since the weather seemed to participate, I brought along my Celestron Travel Scope 70. I seriously put the word "Travel" in the TS 70 to the test for a stargazing tour with my relatives. The telescope is really lightweight and is easy to travel with in its custom backpack.

Aiming the TS 70 at Jupiter with my cousins.

My first stop was in Long-long, La Trinidad. It was a dark site with wonderful star studded skies (see previous post). At first we thought we weren't going to be able to see anything since it was cloudy, but knowing Baguio's skies we knew things change quickly (one minute it looks like it's gonna pour, the next it's crazy sunny). I was able to see the Milky Way after a long time and lots of faint stars that I have missed since moving to the highly urban Manila.

Imaging the stars with an Olympus E-510.

The following day, we went down to Aringay, La Union to visit our grandparents. My cousin knew a remote site by the sea where the skies were extremely dark. However, clouds began to gather as we set up the scope and camera to view Jupiter. I wanted to observe again the following night in the same site, but we had to wake up early to go to Clark. So I set up in the church however there were a lot of obstructions.

Crescent Moon imaged in Aringay.

 Unfortunately, after we came from Clark, the following nights have been cloudy and I wasn't able to do any more observations. I was able to get some images of the moon and the sunset though.

Searching for dark sky sites is a must if you really want to see more during your observations. The problem of urban sites is that light pollution washes out the fainter stars and other celestial objects making them virtually invisible. Having access to dark sky sites is a key tool in observational astronomy. Since these sites are usually in remote places it would also be effective to have a grab-&-go scope or a scope that you can easily set-up and take with you on the go.

Our ride to the observing sites.

Waxing Crescent Moon

Sunset on the road home from Clark

Travel Scope 70 Review

I recently acquired a Celestron Travel Scope 70 from Cutting Edge as an early Christmas gift from my father. It was one of three affordable grab-and-go scopes sold - the other being the Firstscope and the Travel Scope 50 (both less 4k; and the scope at 4470). The Travel Scope 50 had bad reviews so I avoided it. I wanted to get the C90 Maksutov but it was out of the available budget range..hehe. This will be my 2nd refractor, the other being a Tasco 2-inch(?).

The Travel Scope series portable telescope is specially designed for traveling. Both the 50 and 70 are compact refractors suitable for terrestrial and astronomical observing.

The TS 70 has a 70mm aperture in a compact body (17 inches long). It comes with a full size photographic tripod, a 5x24 finderscope, two eyepieces (20mm and 10mm - nothing special) and custom backpack for traveling. It also comes with TheSky x First Light edition. The scope only weighs 3.3lbs making it very easy to carry around. Also, the optics are fully coated. The assembly was quite easy too, I didn't even use the manual (well, that could just be experience speaking).

The tripod was quite shifty though. Try touching the focusing knob while viewing a bright star and it will dance to your touch. It's more stable when collapsed to it's lowest height - more like a table-top scope like the Firstscope. Also, it seems like the tripod couldn't hold the whole weight when pointed towards the zenith. I think the tripod is the biggest let-down. Anyways, you can't expect much from the mount for the price.

I wasn't able to observe much during my first attempt due to poor observing conditions but I was able to view clearly the Double-Double in Lyra, and low-magnitude stars in the tail of Scorpius in a wide field of view. On my second attempt, I had Jupiter in sight and was amazed at the amount of detail I could see. I could make out the bands of Jupiter and saw all 4 Galilean moons. Online reviews say they can see the Trapezium with it, I have yet to test that for myself.

Oh, yeah! It isn't written down in the features but the focuser on the TS 70 has a T-thread on it for SLRs via T-rings. I wonder why this key feature is not mentioned? Just make sure to change the tripod before attempting to attach a weighty SLR.

Although the magnifications attainable (with the given eyepiece) are lesser than the Travel Scope 50 (especially since it comes with a Barlow lens), the TS 70 has a higher aperture for higher maximum useful magnification. Therefore, upgrade your eyepiece and you get better images.



Basically, you can just replace the eyepiece and the tripod with better ones and you get a great scope at a low price! ^_^