The actual telescope is just the bare minimum you need to start stargazing. For a really full experience, you'll need various accessories. And if you thought buying the telescope was a huge investment, trust me, you're going to spend a lot more on the accessories! These are the various eyepieces and other optics I use - and a hairdryer! That's for clearing up any dew or frost on the objective lens during particularly cold nights. Never ever clean or even touch the optics on a lens with your bare fingers!
Other equipment - GO-TO computer controller, camera, camera remote and cables, video cables, solar filter, USB computer connectors - and a good old fashioned compass to quickly find my way round directions ....
25mm and 32mm eyepieces - wide-view optics for looking at stars, star clusters, larger nebulae, splitting binaries and spotting your targets
6mm and 10mm eyepieces - for zooming and seeing more detail, such as planets and the moon surface. What you gain in magnification, you will lose in terms of brightness though.
A 2X Barlow lens, which you attach in front of your eyepiece - it increases the magnification of your image by two times.
Filters, which you attach to the front of the eyepiece. The coloured ones at the top are used to highlight faint features on planets; the ones at the bottom are for reducing glare, 'fringing', block U and IR light and produce spectra for analysis
My Olympus Camedia C-4040. It's old and cheap. But does everything I need for an astronomical camera - compatible attachments to eyepieces, remote control operation, user-defined zooms and exposure times, etc.
A Celestron Neximage CCD imager - basically a webcam for astronomical purposes. The imager takes videos and has a magnification equivalent to a 6mm eyepiece. But using the reducer lens at the bottom can extend its field of view.
The AutoStar controller for controlling the telescope's GO-TO computer.
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