80mm Binoculars vs Orion ST80

I have an Orion ST80. I was wondering if there would be
any advantage of getting a 11x80 or 15x80 pair of Binoculars to learn star-hopping and the night sky.
I just ordered the Sky Atlas 2000 Field Version to help learn the sky.
I was looking into Orion binoculars. Or should I look into 7x50 binoculars?
Thanks for your advice.

Hello Ken,
I just bought a Celestron ST80 off of astromart a couple of weeks ago and I also bought a Celstron Ultima 35mm EP. which gives me about 11 power. I also own a set of Oberwerk 11x70's. The 11x70s are tough to use without a tripod. but once mounted they are fun, the field of view is wider than my scope. but my scope can "power up" with different EP's. this is more important to me now than before.

anything more powerful than 10x in binos and you'll probably want a tripod, the other advantage of the tripod is that once you've found something you can share it with others around you that don't know the sky as well as you do. I had this problem with my nieces and nephews, I'd find something cool in the sky but they were so inexperienced that they couldn't figure out what I was looking at (no green laser either).

I will say that the skies around sagitarius are LOTS of fun with Binos' though. thats why I bought mine. when paired with my 10" telescope my binos are my ultimate finders - faster, easier to point and look and then swing my big gun around and home in on what I've found. I haven't done this same test with the ST80 yet but will this summer. I think I'll wind up selling my binos afterwards. The ST80 gets better crispness than my oberwerks do in the couple of tests I've done so far.

I feel like the minority voice here, but I'm not a big fan of big binoculars. I do like them, but they've never seemed too necessary to me *in addition to* something like an 80 Rich field refractor, which is far more flexible.

A nice pair of small hand held binoculars are far more useful for quick looks and scanning fields before star-hopping with a scope. I'm also in the minority view that thinks tha 10x50's are a bit "too much" - a little too hard to hold steadily. 7x50's, or even 8x42's, are a littler nicer. But I'm not a big guy.

On the other hand, there was a nice trick mentioned in a S&T letters section a year or so ago about using a swivel-headed attachment on long handle as a quick "prop" for steady views with heavy binoculars. A few dollars at a hardware store and *now* I can easily see Jupiter's moons in my 10x50's, and split Albireo, etc.

Ken,

One advantage binoculars have over regular scopes is how easy they are on the eyes since you are using both eyes to view a section of sky. If you do go this route either make or invest in a parallelogram mount for the binocs, alternately you could make a binocular observing chair if you plan to scan the skies for any length of time.

The lower power 7x50's (or better yet some 9x63's) are good for quick spotting, but no matter how light small binocs are your arms and neck eventually become tired being held in 'scan' positions.

Widefield telescopes are good for viewing larger objects like the Orion nebula, Pliedes, North American Nebula, etc. However as a beginner trying to learn the association of objects within constellations, having the 3-5 degree fields in binoculars is more useful. M42 is a good example as in binocs you can see it's relationship to the belt stars in more comfort.