Many people new to astronomy mistakenly believe that they are going to see wonderful colour images through a small telescope. They don't realise that you need equipment like Hubble to get sharp, crisp colourful images. The images below show the difference between Hubble type pictures and what your likely to see through a small telescope.
If you want to obtain colour images then you'll need to invest in a motor drive for the telescope, a camera adapter and an SLR camera or maybe even a CCD camera - non of this stuff is cheap!
The top row of thumb nails are sketches produced by Ian Maule using his Nexstar 5" telescope, the bottom row of thumb nails are images from Hubble. Click on an image to see a larger version in the main viewer.
More of Ians work can be seen here at
My thanks go to Ian for allowing me to use his sketches.
| M12 | M13 | M27 | M36 | M57 | M64 | M81 | M92 |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
;) |
 |
|||||||