How do planets look on a 90mm Maksutov Cassegrain telescope?
Mr Perkins asked:
I recently bought a telescope and tried to see jupiter and mars; however, they just look like really small bright dots even at 180x magnification. Is this how they supposed to look?
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I recently bought a telescope and tried to see jupiter and mars; however, they just look like really small bright dots even at 180x magnification. Is this how they supposed to look?
January 12th, 2010 at 7:55 am
Planets are very small and far away. 180x is about the most you can expect from a 90mm telescope. At 180x with a similar scope I’ve seen Jupiter’s cloud belts and moons, Mars’ polar caps, Saturn’s rings and three brightest moons, and Venus’ phases. Certainly the images are small, but they are definitely larger than dots. You need to be patient and practice seeing detail. I recommend trying to make simple pencil sketches of what you see. I found that this really helped me to see fine detail. Geoff G