two Q's

[Charlton]

anybody know much about telescopes for watching the planets etc, grandson has a small one was thinking of getting one. This could also be quite a cheap way for the photographers on this site to get a telephoto lens quite cheaply, looked at one for about £300 and with camera fixed it would give a lens of around 600-700mm

Anybody do any copying from vhs to disc, appreciate any advice.

[rossi46]

2 q's

will probably need a refractor type telescope for photos as eye piece is usually off set. Boss has a remote electronic one in his garden will quiz him as he takes photographs but cant see them as any use for day to day photography

[Charlton]

will probably need a refractor type telescope for photos as eye piece is usually off set. Boss has a remote electronic one in his garden will quiz him as he takes photographs but cant see them as any use for day to day photography

just reading a review on one, a guy uses his for wildlife photography, would appreciate anythign you can fidn out, belive the Meade are the best?

[Charlton]

just to clarify the hvs to disc, it is to copy home videos to disc via ??? or dircet. What I realy want is a vhs player with a usb cable, but don't know if they exist, vinyl to disc via usb to pc do exist

[codcatcher3000]

vhs to disc is pretty easy if u have a video and dvd player/recorder in one. if not this is a good option VIDEO AUDIO CAPTURE CARD ADAPTER USB 2.0 RECORD VHS TO DVD HDD TV CARD UK | eBay. hope this helps

[Charlton]

cheers codcatcher, never saw that one, it looks the easiest of the lot, son brought one from work but as I already have editing progs on the software wouldn't install, you don't need the software with that one, just staright to USB/PC cheers. Will still look at any other options anyone finds.

[mark]

depends on how much you want to spend. don't be attracted by any of the mega times magnification figures - unless you are spending thousands, 100X is gonna be about asuseable as its going to get - stability/sharpness drop away massively after that with cheaper optics

as important as the optics is a good sturdy, rock solid tripod - the field of view is so small even at 40x that getting the thing to stay still enough for photography is a nightmare

refractors have the best optics, but a refractor with a big aperture (ie big lightgathering capabilities) is daft money

if you can run to it, an 8" reflector will produce fantastic results of the planets.

I had a cheapish 6" reflector (russian, was about 200 quid), anything over 50x started to get a little too blurry for pictures, but the rings/moons around saturn, stripes/moons on jupiter were easily visible and clear - individual moon features though were phenomenal upto about 200x

t'other thing to thing about is what the tracking mechanism is like - with such a narrow field of view what ever you are looking at will be shifting very quickly across the sky, and unless you can grab it in relativeley quick exposure (half second max), the 'scope will need to be tracked in time with the moving object to keep it sharp

bottom line is, bigger the diameter of the scope, the more light it can gather, the better the result.

[Charlton]

cheers mark