USB Telescopes

Funkygreendogs

Hey,
I am a complete beginner, but i would love to get some form of telescope i could plug into my computer and then view images from the telescope/uv ray/radio waves that sort of thing, can anyone give me any info on this as regards: Price, Software, What theyd recommend, Ideas, Links, any info they have on usb telescopes. Thanks
jay

Redshift

But you would miss out on the joy of dragging your telescope up some hill in the dark and having frost bitten fingers and ears and all the other stuff that makes astonomy fun.
Seriously i'm not aware of a plug and play solution like you want but if you have lots of money you can invest in a pc controlled telescope with a ccd camera wired to a capure card or monitor but you are looking at many thousands of euro for such a setup.
My advice to you get a good beginner scope (see the many previous threads) and do it the best way; out in the air looking through an eyepiece.

Capt'n Midnight

Funkygreendogs wrote:

telescope/uv ray/radio waves

What is your budget ?
What are your expecations ?

You could put a USB camera at the focal point of a telescope - no upper limit on prices.

Radio waves - a 100m stearable dish is handy for this , fairly cheap but delivery and installation isn't cheap. What fequencies ? If you have more than one site then you could do long base line stuff. you might be able to do some background noise / meteroite detection using a sound card.

UV - you've got to be joking right !
the atmosphere kinda blocks out a lot of UV.

But unless you are spending the sorts of money that joint international ventures are using you won't get the same sort of pictures.

But if you google enough you might find something ,
One of the first moon detections by radar/radio was by Z Bay in Hungry in 1946 in his spare time using a water voltameter to record the return signal.

JackieChan

Radio waves - a 100m stearable dish is handy for this , fairly cheap but delivery and installation isn't cheap. What fequencies ? If you have more than one site then you could do long base line stuff. you might be able to do some background noise / meteroite detection using a sound card.

You'd also need a fairly big back garden!!!!

Capt'n Midnight

www.setileague.org

http://gofree.indigo.ie/~seti/Index.htm

Funkygreendogs

Thanks for all your helps lads, LOL @ the UV light thing heh i dont know what i was on about there.....
budget wise i was thinking somewhere along the lines of cheap? lol id prolly have around €500 to spend on it, but no i dont want one of those telescopes where it takes ages to find stuff and note the cordinates and all that takes ages especially if your beginner, i was thinking of one of them elecrtronicly conrtolled scopes that automatically know where everything is once you have set them up and coordinated them propperly...
also there are only two windows in my attic, i was thinking if i had one of those electronic scopes, would that have a major effect on it since id have to move to to other window and recalibrate it and id still be missing out on half the sky??

albertw

also there are only two windows in my attic, i was thinking if i had one of those electronic scopes, would that have a major effect on it since id have to move to to other window and recalibrate it and id still be missing out on half the sky??

A goto scope will be difficult to calibrate in an attic with only tiny views of the sky, especially to the accuracy you want where it lands on the target every time perfectly so you dont have to do any manual searching. Also the turbulence of hot air from the house going out the window will result in terrible seeing.