Land Viewing

I live 27 miles from Mt. Rainier and want to view the mountain with a high quality scope during daylight hours. Any suggestions on good scopes and models?

Roger Ternes said:

I live 27 miles from Mt. Rainier and want to view the mountain with a high quality scope during daylight hours. Any suggestions on good scopes and models?

My preference for land viewing is always a small high quality refractor. The choice depends upon your budget, how important portability is, what else you might want to do with the scope.

A few thoughts:

- Terrestrial viewing almost always is limited by the stability of the atmosphere. At 27 miles, you are looking through a lot of atmosphere and unlike when stargazing, you are looking near the horizon. This means turbulence, thermal waves which means high magnification views (>100x or even 60X) are not likely to be clear and sharp.

- A smaller refractor can provide a nice wide field of view and can double as a scope for watching wildlife and such... My choice for terrestial is an William Optics 80mm Fluorite Doublet mounted on a Bogen 3040 tripod but there are many good choices.



- Best thing to do since you are 27 miles from Rainier, hop in the car and head up the road to Anacortes Telescope and Wild bird and take a look at what is available, what it costs, and what it can do.

Jon

Hi Roger,

Jon's suggestion is a good one. The William Optics (WO) scope Jon suggested is an all around telescope. For terrestrial viewing you need a diagonal to tilt the image at an angle to the scope. A porro prism gives you an image that is not reversed left-right or upside down. The common diagonal used in astronomy flips the image left-right.

Spotting scopes are designed for terrestrial viewing, and (usually) will give you a natural (non-inverted or non-reversed) image. The eyepiece is often tilted at a nice angle for viewing. But, a spotting scope is not as easy to use for astronomy as an astronomy scope can be used for terrestrial use.

A good example of a spotting scope is a Leica Televid.

The Televid costs up around $1,600 to $1,800, more than I would or should spend. The WO scope is in the high hundreds or low 4 figures.

These are both refractor designs. The benefit of spending more money is that you can get an APO scope. That means there will be little or no color fringing (false color) around objects. A low priced refractor will have color fringes around objects, and really cheap ones will have poor quality images.

Another option is a Mak, short for Maksutov design. This design is immune from the false color problem. Anacortes has 6 listed in the spotting scope category (do a search for maksutov) ranging in price from $178 without a tripod to $400 with a tripod.

To zoom in on your choices, a few questions:

Is this for casual viewing, or serious viewing?
Did you have a budget in mind?
Will this scope ever be used to look at the moon, planets, or stars?
Is the ability to use more than one magnification important?

A trek up to Anacortes would be great. A few years ago I had my sights set on a particular telescope, but when I saw it in person I realized it was too big for my needs. Nothing like kicking the tires, so to speak.