How to Buy The Right Binoculars For YouWritten by Duane Brown
Binoculars are wonderful pieces of equipment that can enhance many of our daily activities including, birding, action sports, hunting, and even astronomy. Essentially binoculars take a distant image, enlarge it through use of lenses for viewing, all while remaining small and light enough to be mobile.The actual makeup of most binoculars is fairly straightforward and simple. You have lenses at end of barrel called objective lens that gathers light from distant image and focuses it on lens closest to your eyes for viewing. Binoculars are really two small telescopes put side by side so that you can view desired image with both eyes instead of just one. This imparts some measure of depth of field, much more so than with a single scope. When selecting a pair of binoculars you will immediately find that two numbers are used to describe their capability. These numbers are often expressed as "6 X 30" or something similar. Let's break code so you will know what these numbers mean. The first number refers to magnification power of binoculars, or in other words how many times image is magnified. So if number is 6, that means that image that you view through lens is magnified 6 times it's normal siZe. The second number has to do with size of objective lens at end of binoculars.It's good to know this number because larger diameter of objective lens, usually more light will be let in for viewing distant image. Now, let's put this information in use in real world. You may think that it's best to just get highest magnification that you can get for binoculars, but this is not true. At some point, hand holding binoculars will affect clarity of a highly magnified image and resulting shake will render magnification benefits useless. Generally speaking, anything above ten times magnification should be mounted on a tripod instead of handheld. So if you are planning to use binoculars for activities that do not allow you to be able to bring along a sturdy tripod, you probably want to stay with a pair of binoculars with 4 -7 times magnification.
| | Choosing The Right TelescopeWritten by Duane Brown
Ever since Galileo, people have been pointing telescopes to heavens and expanding their view of this world by looking outside of it into other worlds. It can be a fascinating and rewarding endevour. You can even meet some very good friends this way as there are usually local star-gazing clubs within reach of almost anywhere in country that offer plenty of companionship when using your telescope.But how do you choose from wide array of telescopes that are being sold today? Well, first of all you need to understand just a couple of basic points about telescopes. One is that magnification is not really most important characteristic of a telescope. That may seem very strange, but truth is that most significant capability of a telescope is it's ability to gather light. After all, what good is a large image that you can barely see? The light gathering capability of a telescope is usually in direct relation to size of it's aperture or it's light gathering lens or mirror. Now, you are probably thinking that you just need to get a telescope with largest aperture possible then, but that is not case. Somewhere along line there will be a tradeoff between size of aperture and portability. So if you want to transport your telescope at all, you will want to make sure that it is not too heavy and bulky to be mobile. Remember that you will also most likely have to set up and adjust your telescope in dark if your transport it, so having one that is very large can be a daunting task when you can't see what you are doing very well. On magnification factor, you can adjust magnification of almost any telescope through use of different eyepieces, so that is not a really important consideration when buying.
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