Can you actually see anything trough x660 magnification telescope?

Question

How far you can see? Is it worth buying it?

Answer 1

Princess -

Telescope magnification is usually not a good factor to use when buying a telescope. Magnification is entirely controlled by the eyepiece that you use, so it can easily be changed in the field while the scope is set up. Most of the objects that amateur astronomers look at are seen best at around 100X. By the time you get to 300X, the magnification is pretty high, and the image starts to get difficult to focus across the field. Also, the higher the magnification, the harder it is to find the object that you are looking for. At a magnification of 660X, any scope that I have seen is essentially unuseable.

Items that are more valuable to check for are:

1. Aperture - this is basically the size of the telescope diameter (large is good)

2. Solid mount (essential)

3. Reliable supplier (e.g. Orion, Celestron, Meade)

4. Transportability (if you can't move it, you'll never use it)

5. Ease of set-up

6. Quality of accessories

If the scope you are looking at is advertising it's excellence based on magnification, it is probably a marginal quality scope aimed at a kids' market, who do not understand why it is not important. If you tell us more info on the scope itself, we may be able to provide a little more guidance. Good Luck..

ADDED: You asked how far you can see. Even with the naked eye, you can see a galaxy that is over 2 million light years away on a clear, dark night. At 82X with my scope, I have seen objects that are about 60 million light years away - so the light that we are seeing left there about the time that the dinosaurs died out here on Earth.

Magnification does not help to see these dim, distant galaxies. Aperture does.

Answer 2

Telescopes that advertise 660x magnification are typically not worth buying.  My $800 ten inch telescope suggests a maximum magnification of 500x.  But the highest power eyepiece that comes with it yields 120x.  Mostly, i use it at 48x.  High magnification isn't that important. I did pick up a 2x barlow, which combined with my higher power eyepiece yields 240x.  This is good for craters on the Moon, details on Jupiter.  But high magnification without a large aperture will be very dim for all but the brightest objects.  And if you don't have large aperture, the image will be grainy at best.  My next eyepiece will probably give me something around 20x.  Why lower power?  I want something with a wider field of view.  There are several very large objects - the Veil Nebula, the Andromeda galaxy, the extended Orion nebula, and i'd like to be able to see more of these in one go.

I've seen department store telescopes that don't provide a single eyepiece that yields low enough magnification so that the scope actually supports it.  And, they come with a poor quality focuser, and a very poor quality mount - which just lead to frustration.  If you have to spend ten minutes getting something in focus, only to have your eyelashes push it out of focus, and the mount is so wobbly that your breath sends it bouncing around, your going to pick it up in frustration and throw it to the ground and stamp on it.

If you are interested in astronomy, go to a local club.  Check out their stuff.  Let them show you objects in the sky.  Don't buy anything you haven't tried.  Go with advice you get.  Or just use their equipment forever.  My club has loaner scopes, and an observatory.  The $800 for my scope would pay for 26 years of club membership.

Here are the 3 P's for picking a telescope.  Price, Performance, and Portability.  Price and portability can be show stoppers.  Price less so, since you may be able to wait until you have more cash. But a scope that doesn't fit in your car is stuck where ever it ends up.  That leaves performance.  For deep space, what you need is as much light gathering as possible.  That's usually a Newtonian reflector.

The push-to computer also comes under the category of performance.  Before buying my scope, i joined a local astronomy club and borrowed each of their loaner scopes in turn.  One was a ten inch reflector.  I spent half an hour not finding a fairly bright galaxy in my back yard.  It was too dim for my sky conditions.  Then, i repeated this for another galaxy.  Spending an hour to not find two galaxies is not something that will sustain me in the hobby.  With a push-to computer, i can observe a dozen objects an hour.  In in very short time, i found that very few galaxies can be seen from my heavily light polluted back yard.  And, an oxygen 3 filter lets me see most nebulae.

Back to my scope.  The tube length is 48".  It fits across the back seat of any car.  I had a $1000 budget, so the $800 scope fit.  I bought an oxygen 3 filter (about $89) at the same time.  I might have bought the 12" scope, but the tube is 8" longer, and doesn't fit in my car.  I might have gone with a truss dob with a larger mirror, but at the time, it was over my budget, and there was no computer.

Answer 3

In general, the biggest magnification you'll get from a telescope is twice the size of the main lens when measured in millimeters. A telescope with a lens of size 330mm (about 7 inches) will be able to provide a magnification of x660, but it will cost about a thousand dollars.

Answer 4

Not with the naked eye. If the optics are extremely good and the aperture wide enough, you can get some pretty good time-exposure photos at high magnification. However, it's not so easy to define the magnification power in photographs; it depends on how far the photo is from your eye when you view it.  

Answer 5

short answer - yes, if it's a good telescope, but a telescope being advertised as 660x probably isn't any good

long answer - Let me put it to you this way:  The Hubble telescope is less than 1000x.  It can achive it's great detail by having a large diameter.  A tiny telescope simply doesn't have the quality or light gathering power to make high power realistic.