Do You Need a GPS for Your Telescope?
The short answer is no, but they are damn handy.
Most telescopes these days have computers that slew and drive little stepper motors to track the sky. They are able to point to a planet, star, galaxy, nebulae and a variety of other objects at the push of a button.
That’s really, really cool and it makes looking at the sky with a telescope much more accessible to beginners who haven’t yet learned their way around the sky. Nowadays, all a person has to do is take the telescope outside, level the tripod, turn it on and start looking at stuff (oh you newbies, I remember when I hadda actually use my setting circles and finderscope. It also snowed everyday back in the old days….).
In order to do this cool stuff though, and put the galaxy in the eyepiece, the telescope has to know where it is and what time it is. Once it knows that, it can tell what’s up for you to see.
That’s where the GPS comes in. Oh sure, you could manually enter the information in the keypad, with your actual fingers and looking at an actual clock, but that’s so passé. It’s way better to have the computer just get that info off of the satellite.
I bought my Meade 10-inch SCT in the mid-1990’s so mine doesn’t have a GPS unit, I actually enter in the stuff. I can’t do it as accurately as a GPS, especially when entering the time, but it’s usually close enough.
Do you need a GPS unit? No, but it gets you observing faster and that can only be a good thing.
Photo Credit: Jurvetson
Technorati Tags: GPS, night sky, observing, telescopes
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