Telescope or Binoculars?

With naked eye you can view Sun (through a filter for safety of eyes), Moon, Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars & if you are lucky Mercury too (as it is very close to Sun). Very occasionally you might see 'Uranus' (leave the joke part) when it is in opposition, that is opposed to the direction of Sun in the sky. Then there are almost five thousand stars spread almost equally across sky, neatly mapped into 88 constellations.

At anytime you can view half the sky. Naked eye enables you to see down to a magnitude 6.0 star. The problem is all appear as tiny dots of varied colours.

Colour can be a good identification mark (Venus is dazzling white, Jupiter is white-yellow, Mars is red, Sirius is brilliant blue, Betelgeuse is red and so on). All planets (Sun & Moon included) are much brighter than stars and move along a path that is a circle (closed) called 'Ecliptic' (Zodiac). Planets (meaning 'wanderers') can be noticed to have moved (against the starry background) the next day (Moon) or over much longer time unlike stars (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus in that order of slowness).

Sun's movement can be inferred. One can see a dozen Messier objects which are clusters of stars (open or globular), a galaxy (Andromeda) and some 'nebulae' ('Orion'). Rarely one can see a comet in some part of constellation either as a small wispy blob or with stretched tail.

These 'visitors' are normally heralded before-hand by lot of noise & cacophony by the learned amongst humans; so you can't miss and be well prepared. Meteor showers have their own calender like the festival dates. Information about the time (of night), the 'Radial' point (address amongst the stars from which they appear) of each shower is widely disseminated in this age of 'internet'.

Binoculars (7X50) have a 2" or 50mm objective (leave out the 35mm as I don't prefer it) takes you down to 10.8 magnitude. With it you can see just the discs of planets (don't expect Saturn's rings or Jupiter's red spot) but not Venus. It reveals a bit more of Messier objects.

But with it you feel you are at a distance of 34,000 miles above the Moon, the same distance from which a geostationary satellite views Earth. In place of the five thousand stars, you can see about eight hundred thousand. With a telescope of 3" aperture add 1 more magnitude and you'll see a million more stars as points or many more galaxies, nebulae and much more interesting objects.

At that level you need to know position of the object from a catalogue of a million objects and set it carefully. It is a lot of work then. If you have a better telescope (4 1/2" or why not 6"?), even the air vibrations will crazily throw the picture out of view.

The instrument needs to be mounted firmly with a full knowledge about co-ordinates and stuff like that. By then you have turned yourself into a serious amateur astronomer labeling every tiny dot of light whether seen by eye or through the telescope and your 'target' embedded in an equally good-looking collage of tiny specks of light. I consider it a pleasure to view 'Pleiades', 'Praesepe', 'Jewel box', 'Orion' nebula, Omega Centauri.

Andromeda galaxy doesn't show well in an amateur telescope. Then you run to pictures from Hubble telescope from the 'net', APOD etc.

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