Science Store For The Stars!

Start a child in an astronomy hobby, and avoid the pitfalls!

When I caught the astronomy bug and bought my first telescope a few years ago I felt like I was a kid again and it was Christmas. As I counted the days until my scope arrived, I started learning all I could about astronomy by buying magazines, books, and reading what I could on the internet, as well as watching good Science TV shows. I read about how people looking through a telescope would literally gasp upon seeing one of these beautiful celestial objects for the first time. The photos online were just amazing and I couldn't wait to get out and see all those spiral galaxies, colorful nebulae, the red spot on Jupiter, and everything else.

When it finally arrived, taking my telescope out star gazing was quite an "eye opening" experience. I spent my nights trying to see as many celestial objects as I could. Eventually, my nieces and nephews were bugging me to let them come out too. However, ranging from 3 to 11 years old, the best viewing times in the summer were way past their bedtimes. But I took it out early one night and let them take a look at Jupiter through the scope at dusk. Then we tried looking at some other objects but unfortunately, it wasn't quite the experience they expected, or that I had expected for them. There are 3 things I learned very quickly and would pass on to anyone thinking of helping a young astronomer begin his or her career. 1) Objects seen through a telescope rarely look like the clear, colorful photos you see. 2) The objects you are looking at are infinitely more interesting if you know something about them. 3) Be very careful about managing a child's expectations about what they expect to see. So let's take this one at a time.

Walking through large department stores you'll notice the no-name brand telescopes being sold that advertise 400x power (sounds good, right?) and show beautiful large color pictures of heavenly objects on the box. I had researched well and knew not to buy one of those. For this is where parents and their young astronomers run into disappointment and often become frustrated and quit the hobby. If the telescope's box shows a bright, colorful, large object, wouldn't you expect to see that when, you look through the scope? Or how about a nice large, clear and detailed picture of Jupiter or Saturn, just like on the box? The answer is no.

The human eye is unable to see the color that can be picked up by a camera. Therefore, a nebula that shows up in photos with wonderful reds and purples, and sticks out in sharp contrast to neighboring stars will look gray, faint, and ghostly through your telescope. And that's if you can see it at all. Jupiter will show some color, but the image will be very small in your eyepiece, nothing like the picture on the box. And switching to a more powerful eyepiece will just make the image blurry and useless. I'm not saying what you'll see is disappointing, quite the contrary. But if expectations are set too high for a child, the let-down can be damaging.

Second, the best way to start astronomy is by learning about what you're looking at. And you don't need any equipment to do it! Let's take the following example: Imagine looking at a star cluster. Looks pretty, right? Now look at it again knowing it's M-13 or Messier 13, the Hercules Cluster, the best globular cluster north of the celestial equator. A naked eye object under very dark skies with 500,000 stars extending 150 light years across and a distance of 26,000 light years from Earth. Discovered by Edmond Halley (of Halley's comet) in 1714. While Messier never saw its individual stars, even a small telescope brings out the details in this magnificent mass of stars. This globular cluster is about 14 billion years old! Three dark rifts radiate outward from near the center, like a dark "propeller". So even if the younger ones can't grasp all of those concepts, you have a description of details to look for. M-13 is located in the constellation Hercules, son of Zeus, the hero who was made to perform twelve great tasks to cleanse himself after he went temporarily insane, killing his wife and children. You'll have to decide if that part of the story is appropriate for your child, but do you see how the constellation and the object in it now have life?

I'm not saying you shouldn't buy a telescope, but start going out at night with your young scientist, lie down on a big comfortable blanket, wait 20 to 30 minutes until your eyes adjust to the dark (don't fall asleep!), and learn to identify the constellations. Talk about the stories behind them. Kids have great memories and they are very visually acute and you will be surprised at how quickly they learn to identify the constellations and start repeating the names and stories back to you. Plus, if you know that M-13 is in the constellation Hercules and you can identify the constellation, you can find the object making it easier to use your telescope or binoculars. Check out our Janice VanCleave books on the subject, they're a great way to get started. Think about a science fair project as a great way to get a youngster interested and involved in astronomy! Print our Sky Map and see many of the constellations that are visible from August to October.

And third, you need to manage their expectations. If they expect to see a big, bright, colorful object, and they end up having to struggle to see a bland blurry one, and it takes you a long time to find it, they will get frustrated and lose interest. It also depends on what age the child is. The Janice VanCleave books are for kids 8+, and is probably a good age to start. Although, my nephew memorized all the planets and their order from the Sun when he was 5 and was obsessed with it. He painted 9 rocks the way he thought the colors of the planets were and put them in order, from Mercury to Pluto, over and over again driving his parents nuts! When it came time to look at things through the telescope it was a little tougher though. Kids have big imaginations and they expect big things. Astronomy can be a slow and deliberate hobby, with very subtle views. As a parent you need to decide when to start your child in this fantastic hobby. If they have become interested, it doesn't matter what their age, you can teach them as much as they can grasp.

There are certain objects that will really capture their interest and aren't too difficult to find. Check out our page on star gazing for summer and fall. I had never heard of a globular cluster before, but the first time I saw one I literally gasped as I had read about so many people doing! A globular cluster is a very old collection of tens of thousands to hundreds or thousands of stars. Many of these clusters can be located with the naked eye, and using binoculars, or a low power telescope will be a real treat for a young child. I think globular clusters are the coolest thing to view through your telescope. Jupiter and Saturn are also good objects to start with, although the image itself can be rather small unless the telescope is bigger. And you wont see anything more than a small blob with binoculars.

I was extremely interested in astronomy at a young age, right after my dinosaur-phase. I used to go out in my backyard at night and map the sky on a pad of paper. My parents bought me a cheap telescope with basically tin foil for a mirror, and it was just awful. It never focused or showed anything in any detail, even the moon was blurry and I don't remember it coming with any instructions. My mother says my father and I went out one night and tried to use the telescope and she says I came in frustrated, angry, and never used the telescope again. 30 years later I bought my first telescope and again became interested in the hobby. It's not my parents fault, how would they know?

Some basic info on telescopes:

First let's get a basic understanding of what kinds of telescopes there are. There are a few different types, and to make it simple there are reflectors and refractors. Refractor telescopes use lenses like binoculars to refract or bend the light coming in. Reflectors, on the other hand, use a primary mirror which first captures the light, reflecting it to a smaller secondary mirror, then through an eyepiece (a lense) before it gets to your eye. There are many different kinds of reflectors including the Dobsonian (often called a light-bucket), SCT or Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope, Maksutov-Cassegrain, Newtonian reflectors, Ritchey-Chretien, and others. We won't get into the specifics of these, but the different types of reflectors all basically work the same way - by reflecting light.

You will also hear the terms Az-Alt and Equatorial mounts. An Az-Alt is short for Azimuth (side to side) and Altazimuth (up and down). This is the more basic and less expensive mount (all the telescopes we sell have Az-Alt mounts) and are just fine for lower power scopes. Equatorial mounts are more complicated and more expensive and they actually keep up with the motion of the sky. The rotation of the Earth creates the illusion that the stars are moving across the sky from east to west. So when you look at something through your telescope, eventually the object moves out of your field of vision. The stronger the power you are using, the faster the object moves out of your field of vision and the more adjustments you must make to continue viewing it. An equatorial mount is used mainly for photography since keeping the object steady and in the field of vision keeps the image from being blurred. It has either a knob that you turn by hand to keep the object in your field of vision, or a motor that does it for you.

Now after reading this you're probably thinking the equatorial mount is better right? Not necessarily. The set up for an equatorial mount is time consuming and difficult and may discourage you and your future astronomer from going out and sky watching as often as you'd like to. It is all due to the alignment of the telescope with Earth and the stars above. Remember that the North Star (Polaris) is the star that (almost) never moves. It's what sailors used hundreds and even thousands of years ago to navigate ships across the oceans. And believe it or not, it's still used today. Ship captains are trained to navigate using Polaris in case their electronic navigation system on the ship happens to fail. Setting up an equatorial mount consists of aligning the telescope, first, relative to Earth's north and south poles, and second, to Polaris and other stars. We won't get into anymore detail about how it's done, but it's much easier to grab you're Az-alt telescope, set it down in your backyard and start viewing. If you know it's easy to do, you're more likely to do it often. Take our word for it, you will do much more sky observing with a simple Az-Alt mount and the experience will be far more satisfying.

The purpose of a telescope is to first, capture as much light as possible with the primary mirror or refracting lense(s), and second, to focus it (with an eyepiece) into a clear and sharp image. The eyepieces are what give you different powers (also called magnifications). One lesson I learned rather quickly was that you didn't need an expensive, large, and powerful scope to see some of the best objects in the sky. There are many considerations when buying a telescope, but one of the most obvious and easy to understand is the size of the primary mirror or lens. I went to a star party once with my 8" SCT, a reflector telescope that has an 8 inch diameter primary mirror. Someone else there had the same scope but with a 9.25" mirror which gives off 33% more light than mine. Sounds like a lot, right? That's what I thought. But when I looked through both our scopes I could not tell the difference. This made me very happy, as my scope was lighter and less expensive.

I had a wide range of eyepieces, which vary the power of the scope, but soon discovered that I was using the lower power eyepieces much more often than the more powerful ones. The reason is that, when viewing Jupiter for instance, the higher the power you use, the bigger the object gets, yes, but the blurrier it gets too! This was frustrating, because the fun of looking at Jupiter is to recognize the colored bands in its atmosphere, and most importantly the Great Red Spot and Junior Red Spot. So, when you see a telescope that offers, as the example above, The moon is really the only object in the sky that you could use a power of anywhere close to 400x power without getting blurry images. Everything else will be unobservable.

Copyright © Science Store for the Stars 2007