User manual MEADE 114EQ-AR

[. . . ] Meade114EQAR 3/28/07 9:52 AM Page 1 www. meade. com MEADE INSTRUCTION MANUAL 114mm | 4. 5" Equatorial Reflecting Telescope 114EQ-AR Meade114EQAR 3/28/07 9:52 AM Page 2 WARNING! Never use a Meade® Telescope to look at the Sun!Looking at or near the Sun will cause instant and irreversible damage to your eye. Eye damage is often painless, so there is no warning to the observer that damage has occurred until it is too late. Children should always have adult supervision while observing. Meade114EQAR 3/28/07 9:52 AM Page 3 INTRODUCTION Your telescope is an excellent beginner's instrument, and is designed to observe objects in the sky. [. . . ] Saturn is not the only planet that has rings, but it is the only set of rings that can be seen with a small telescope. Jupiter's rings cannot be seen from Earth at all--the Voyager spacecraft discovered the ring after it passed Jupiter and looked back at it. It turns out, only with the sunlight shining through them, can the rings be seen. Optional color filters help bring out detail and contrast of the planets. Beyond the Solar System: Once you have observed our own system of planets, it's time to really travel far from home and look at stars and other objects. At first, you may think stars are just pinpoints of light and aren't very interesting. There is much information that is revealed in stars. The first thing you will notice is that not all stars are the same colors. The color of stars sometimes can tell you about the age of a star and the temperature that they burn at. Very often, you can find double (or binary) stars, stars that are very close together. Does one seem brighter than the other? SURF THE WEB · · · · · · The Meade 4M Community: http://www. meade4m. com Sky & Telescope: http://www. skyandtelescope. com Astronomy: http://www. astronomy. com Astronomy Picture of the Day: http://antwrp. gsfc. nasa. goc/apod Photographic Atlas of the Moon: http://www. lpi. ursa. edu/research/lunar_orbiter Hubble Space Telescope Public Pictures: http://oposite. stsci. edu/pubinfo/pictures. html Looking at or near the Sun will cause irreversable damage to your eye. Do not look through the telescope as it is moving. Meade114EQAR 3/28/07 9:52 AM Page 14 Almost all the stars you can see in the sky are part of our galaxy. A galaxy is a 12 large grouping of stars, containing millions or even billions of stars. Some galaxies form a spiral (like our galaxy, the Milky Way) and other galaxies look more like a large football and are called elliptical galaxies. There are many galaxies that are irregularly shaped and are thought to have been pulled apart because they passed too close to--or even through--a larger galaxy. You may be able to see the Andromeda galaxy and several others in your telescope. The two easiest to see in the Northern Hemisphere are the Orion nebula during the winter and the Triffid nebula during the summer. These explosions are called supernovas. When you become an advanced observer you can look for other types of objects such as asteroids, planetary nebula and globular clusters. And if you're lucky, every so often a bright comet appears in the sky, presenting an unforgettable sight. The more you learn about objects in the sky, the more you will learn to appreciate the sights you see in your telescope. The best exercise for drawing is to observe the moons of Jupiter every night or so. Try to make Jupiter and the moons approximately the same size as they look in your eyepiece. As you get better at drawing, try more challenging sights, like a crater system on the moon or even a nebula. [. . . ] · As you make adjustments to the primary mirror tilt screws (3, Fig. 13), you will notice that the out-of-focus star disk Looking at or near the Sun will cause irreversable damage to your eye. Do not look through the telescope as it is moving. Meade114EQAR 3/28/07 9:52 AM Page 21 image will move across the eyepiece field. Choose one of the 3 primary mirror tilt screws and slightly move the shadow to the center of the disk. [. . . ]