Amazon Offers and Promotions (NEW) - UPDATED WEEKLY

I have collected almost every promotion, free trials, free shipping services and offers here and will keep updating it in regular basis, weekly for now and I hope soon will do it daily. I believe if their are ways to save money as long as we all shop at Amazon, why not use it and share it here with you!!

Refractor or Reflector, for Deep Sky Photography

If you target for faint deep sky imaging, then you will need a very good quality optics, and these come in two main designs, refractors and reflectors. Refractors are the ones with the main objective lens at the front, reflectors counts on a big light-collecting mirror and come in several different configurations. So here's your first big decision, refractor or reflector, and what size?

Listening to black holes

The lowest note ever produced in the universe is B flat !

Ever wondered what a black hole "sounds" like? As NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope recently discovered, is B flat.

Unfortunately there's no way of listening to it because the note is 57 octaves below middle C.

That's a million billion times lower than the limit of human hearing, making it the deepest note that's ever been detected in the universe.

The Hunt For New Planets

The Extra Terrestrial Planets

They have been among the hottest things in astronomy for more than a decade. But let's face it. Giant Jupiters, fried Neptunes, inflated fat Saturns, pairs of giants in resonant orbits - these are just lead-ups to the main act. What we really need to know about are Exo-Earths. By an "Earth," astronomers generally mean a planet that's small enough to have a solid, rocky surface but big enough to hold a considerable atmosphere, and maybe with the possibility of "liquid" water. In other words, a place where life as we know it might arise and remains. Perhaps even, with a lot of luck, a place where humans could someday walk around on it's surface with nothing more than an oxygen tube, or even without.

Infrared Astronomy

Infrared light or (IR) is an electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than that of visible light that naked eye can see, starting from the nominal edge of visible red light at 0.7 micrometres, and extending gradually to 300 micrometers.

These wavelengths correspond to a frequency range of approximately 430 to 1 THz, and also it includes most of the thermal radiation emitted by objects near room temperature.

So it simply bring us to a new world that we never saw before with our naked eyes, and opens up many areas of studies in many field, including astronomy.

Barlow Lenses and Focal Reducers

Simply, it's a concave (negative) lens placed between a telescope objective and eyepiece to increase the magnification, usually by two or three times. The negative lens reduces the angle of convergence of the light cone, effectively making it appear to the eyepiece that the primary has a longer focal length. It was invented in the early1800s by English physicist Peter Barlow (1776–1872)

Eyepieces for Telescope

What is the Eyepiece

The eyepiece is the lens assembly at the focal point of the telescope that forms and magnifies the image. Most telescopes, even department store types, come with at least one for initial use. Sadly today many of the major manufacturers deliver their telescopes with just that one eyepiece. Today’s Celestar 8 and Nexstar 8 telescopes,the current editions of the legendary Celestron C8, come with only a single 25-mm Plossl eyepiece (though Celestron does offer a nice observing kit that adds five more eyepieces and a filter set for under $100).

Binoculars in Astronomy

Portable, Cheap, wide field viewing and easy!, you say why not. although they have their limits, you can always enjoy observing by them a good number of sky gems.

iPhone App: SkyVoyager

SkyVoyager is a powerful astronomy app for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch. It is designed for both beginners and advanced users. It contains a database of 300,000 stars to 10th magnitude, and 30,000 deep sky objects, including the entire NGC and IC catalogs. It renders the planets and moons in detail, using NASA mission imagery, and includes a database of several hundred asteroids, comets, and artificial satellites.

iPhone App: iStellar

iStellar is a mobile planetarium and astronomy app for iPhone and iPod Touch. Based on the time and location setting input by the user, iStellar able to display the stars on the night sky for the given location. Information obtained through the GPS function, iStellar will chart the location of stars and will rotate according to the position detected by the position sensor. It is optimized for Multi-Touch control, allowing you to operate intuitively; drag to move the star chart, pinch to zoom in and out, and so on.

Low budget Astrophotography

Astrophotography may sound to be a huge step for beginners and is only reserved to professionals who spend years and years in this hobby and with quite expensive gadgets. As a matter of fact it needs good experience, but you will educate yourself with trial and error time after time, but to be honest, it's very tricky and maybe impossible to have results like the powerful high-end imaging devices, especially when imaging deep sky objects, but with cheaper equipment you can create decent images if you know how to tweak'em to the limits, now we will see how it's done.

The Newtonian Reflector Telescope

This Uniquely-look telescope first developed by another pioneer in science, Sir Isaac Newton. The design of this telescope is fairly simple. Other than the lenses in the eyepiece, there is only one surface that has a curve in it (the primary mirror).

Sky Navigation: Altitude and Azimuth

Whatever the celestial object you desire to observe, you first need to find it(obviously), when we talk about stars (or any other celestial objects) we need to have a system for identifying where they are in the sky.

Refracting Telescopes

When a "Telescope" term come in mind, we always think of that tube with the big lens and the small one we look in. Though its inventor may be lost in history, this early kind of telescope is called a "Galilean" or simple refractor. The Galilean refractor consists of two lenses: a convex (curved outward) lens held in front of a concave (curved inward) lens a certain distance away. As you know, the telescope’s front lens is called the objective, while the other is referred to as the eyepiece, or ocular.

Telescope Accessories for beginners

There are some essential accessories and gadgets that you should consider buying with your telescope.

Starter Telescope Models for Beginners

What to consider ?

There are a wide rang out there you can pick from. And I will try here to review and show you some of these models which are recommend for a beginner, compared to the cost.

Buying a Telescope for Beginners

So, you intend to buy a telescope, my belief that there are three primary concerns a beginner should have when buying a first scope: cost, size (& type), and reliability. Those three aspects are very common when you decide to buy whatever you put in mind, so we will try to follow them from a amateur point of view or just a father who want to get his son the scope he always dreamed of.