Telescope Accessories For Astronomers

Setting up in the night air you and your fellow star gazers are excited about tonight’s viewing. A comet should be tearing across the sky in about an hour, and you are going to be ready for it.

After 20 minutes, however, your lenses start to fog and you begin to panic. Do you have the proper telescope accessories to see you through the night?

Telescope Accessories For Astronomers

Here are a few must haves for every astronomer, amateur or otherwise. In some cases you may not want to spend the money on a particular telescope accessory; some times there are work-arounds that we have addressed below that will help you in either case.

Single-Power Finders

Ever have a hard time finding what you want to see in the night sky? The clarity of your scope won’t matter if you can’t even locate the star you are seeking. A Single-Power Finder will help with this.

A Single-Power Finder will superimpose a reticule over what you see when you look through your scope, allowing you to pinpoint with a great deal of accuracy what you are looking for. Start with a low setting for a wide field of view; you can then narrow it down when you are in the ballpark. Some Single-Power Finder will have a pulse setting, turning the reticule on and off at an interval, which gives you the best of both worlds.

Lights

You are going to be doing your stargazing at night; which means you might have some trouble reading your star charts without a light source.

Pulling your flashlight out of the kitchen drawer on your way out to the field won’t always suffice, however, especially if you are going out in a group where the bright white light can be disturbing to others.

Try for a red light, for starters, and one that has an adjustable brightness feature. One more tip; use a magnifying glass. Your eyes might be perfectly healthy, but using a magnifying glass means you can go with a much dimmer light and still be able to read the smallest text.

Dew Remover

Out in the night air, as the temperature around you drops, dew will often form on the telescope optics, obscuring the clarity of your view. You can have dew shields installed at the front of a telescope, which works fairly well in most cases, but sometimes it just gets too wet for even the dew shield to do much good. In that case you need a Dew Remover.

You can purchase a dew removal system for your telescope, or use some home grown methods of dealing with the damp. The optics need to be warmer than the dewpoint, so to warm them up the dew removal system will heat the lenses.

Barring this you can try a particle hair dryer on low setting, or use a car heater.

The list is not exhaustive, of course, but they should see you through. Don’t forget a comfortable chair and a cooler with refreshments to keep you going through a long night of star gazing!