Wayne

31 May 2011

The test here wasn't really a good one, the Skywatcher 8" Newtonian would out perform a 4" telescope hands down under deep sky observing, an 8" has 77% more light gathering power then a 6" Telescope so do the math on a 4". Plus a 8" F:5 telescope is geared up for wide field deep sky astronomy where low to medium power is all that's needed, but the light gathering ability is the real key, when viewing faint fuzzys the more light pull is a must, in the test had the scopes pointed at M13 a Globular Cluster the Skywatcher would have won hands down, pin point stars from the outer edge and nearing the centre would have been easily resolved, in a 4" scope it would have been just a faint fuzzy like blob and in a 3" the view would be even less impressive. The main thing to remember is all the electronics in the world mean nothing to what you can see through the eyepiece, apart from the very casual astronomer out of the three apart from the 8" Newtonian the other two would soon be out grown so far as the objects within their reach, and as the new astronomer craves to see more detail with distant objects. Bottom line buy a telescope with at least a 6" aperture, as from that size upwards is where astronomy becomes very interesting for the visual astronomer!