Astronomy Buff

The Coolest Damn Telescope You Can Buy for $500

by Tony on September 12th, 2007

In order to watch the transit of Mercury last November, I bought a Coronado PST (PST stands for Personal Solar Telescope). It is a telescope designed for visual use (you can image with it, but it’s not trivial) and has a filter that only allows light from the Sun centered at 6563 angstroms, also known as the hydrogen alpha line, through to your eye. This line is located in the red part of the visual spectrum (the part of the spectrum our eyes can see), so viewing though this telescope produces a red solar disk.

Let me just say right off the bat that viewing the Sun in h-alpha is incredible. I want to marry my PST. I want to take it out on a date and buy it dinner, perhaps a movie later. I love this telescope. If this telescope were a woman I’d…. Well, you get the point.

If I were to recommend a first telescope today, this would be it and i really can’t believe it only costs $500.00. It is trivial to use, all you need to do is set it up on a video tripod. Finding the Sun is a breeze with the ingenious little finder they have integrated into it which allows you to center the Sun in the eyepiece without ever having to look directly at it.

The views of the Sun are breathtaking and would impress any first time telescope user. To be sure, you can only look at the Sun with this telescope, but I have found myself using this scope more that all my others lately. I think the fact that I can take it out during the warmth of the day has a lot to do with it, but I’m also becoming addicted to looking at the features changing daily on the disk. Every day, there is something different to look at.

It also comes with a Meade Electronic Eyepiece which allows you to hook up the telescope to a video monitor, a VCR, or a computer with a video capture card in it. On the day of the transit of Mercury, I set it up to a video monitor so that my friends could all see it easily.

Needless to say, the transit was a huge hit. I also have my Meade 10 inch set up with a regular, white light solar filter on it but the star of the show was the Coronado PST.

Normally, when you look at the Sun through regular solar filters, you only see sunspots on the solar disk. In h-alpha, you see so much more. You can see filaments, so-called active regions of high magnetic fields, the granular structure of the solar surface, and prominences on the limb.

Photo Credit: Michael Karrer

How much detail you can see in h-alpha depends on the width of the filter, with narrower filters producing more contrast. Usually, solar telescopes used for research have a bandpass of about a quarter of an angstrom, and they are very expensive. You begin to lose contrast and details on the solar disk when the filter exceeds about 1 angstrom in width. The PST boasts a bandpass of less than one angstrom and you can cut that down to less that a half angstrom with an upgrade (which is kinda pricey, about an additional $700.00). The off the shelf version is more than enough however to see some amazing solar activity.

I really can’t believe what a great value this telescope is. An h-alpha telescope with a Meade Electronic Eyepiece for $500.00 is one of the best values I’ve ever found in a telescope.

Further Reading:

Here is another great review of the Coronado PST.

Photo Credit: Michael Karrer

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