Just started a new hobby to go alongside car modifications.
Bought myself a dobsonian telescope with an 8 inch aperture, already have a dslr camera I can attach for astrophotography. There's a lot to learn, so if any of you have experience then please pass it on
Here's the beast....
A Dobsonian is a great starting scope- your get more bang for your buck (where bang = the size of the hole at the front of the scope). The bigger the hole (objective) the more light it gathers so the more you can see and higer you can magnify.
Magnification is done with the eyepiece. A rough guied to the magnification is to divide the focal legth of the telescope (marked in mm on the black sticker you can see) by the focal length of the eyepiece so, if yours is a 200mm/ 8" Dob, the focal length will be around 1200mm. If you have a 25mm eyepiece, the magnification will be 1200/ 25 = 48X.
A 10mm eypiece will give 12X magnification.
Be careful with magnification however. Shorter focal length eypiece reduce the brightness/ contrast of the image and also image quality falls off with higher magnification.
With using a Dobsonian for astrophotography, be aware of star trailing. With a mount like the Dobsonian, you move in altitude (pointing the scope higher or lower in the sky) and azimuth (rotating the scope from left to right and back again), known as an alt/az mount. The sky doesn't "move" in quite that fashion. It doesnt move in a parallel semi circle in relation to the horizon. It arcs from a point in the east, over your head and down to a point in the west. This means that if you have the shutter open too long, the image will trail or blur.
Maximum shutter speed for alt/ az mounts (or undriven equatorial mounts) can be worked out with another bit of arithmatic- 500/ focal length so, 500/1200 gives a shtter speed of just under half a second. Ramp up the ISO and give it a go on stars etc. For the moon, half a second will be too long. get out therer and play- though I have a feelingt that the recent cloud cover must be your fault for buying a new scope.....
Lots of good advice etc. on here-
https://stargazerslounge.com/