The ultimate goal was to have the card of one player in as many different color Refractor parallels as possible, thus completing the rainbow. This can be particularly difficult with low-numbered versions and multiple collectors attempting to complete a rainbow for the same player. With so many Refractor options, it might seem that collectors would not have a favorite. However, one color in particular has always been among the most popular versions. Collectors love gold. This is something that has been seen throughout the history of collecting.
In addition, the Gold Refractors are usually numbered to 50, which is rare enough to produce big values, but there is enough supply so that they are not impossible to find. Another option is aimed at Collectors who are looking for extreme rarity over all else.
These one-of-one Superfractor cards have become the pinnacle of high-end card collecting. Huge sums of money are thrown around whenever one of these rare Refractors emerge.
Topps has used Refractor cards to build several popular products and also offer collectors something unique and valuable that almost no other card company could match. On a smaller scale, Leaf offered a competing Refractor concept but they did not approach the same level of respect or value as Topps Refractors.
The best challenger appears to be Panini, who transitioned from their European sticker beginnings to become a major player in the sports and trading card industry. In this product, the Refractors are officially referred to as Prizms, which can be confusing because that is also the name of the brand. Once again, Gold Prizms, this time numbered to 10, are the preferred parallel for collectors.
Like most things in the hobby world, products that featured a strong overall rookie class or a few hobby-elite rookie players, tended to emerge as the most revered Refractor-based sets.
The top rookie Refractor options from each of the big four professional sports are noted below by year of release. Due to the inclusion of prospect and rookie cards, more hobby attention, and a longer average maturation process for players, the value of many products is not fully known until several years later. Prospecting is something that has emerged and Bowman Chrome is the product of choice for collectors to do that. Further complicating things is the prospect versus rookie card debate.
As a result, more recent rookie players have a variety of cards that fall across multiple years and are touted as rookies.
Basketball Refractors may produce higher prices for singles, but baseball Refractors will always remain the top overall option. The NBA benefited greatly from Refractors and had many popular years. However, Topps lost their NBA license at the end of the season.
Just in time for the season, which features a double-rookie class, Panini's Prizm line helped fill the Refractor void. The culmination may have been the season, which saw a strong influx of rookie talent and the football world went crazy.
The NHL did not enjoy the same success as other leagues with the Refractor phenomenon. This is because Topps stopped making hockey cards after the season. As a result, many of the top NHL players today do not have Refractor cards available. The rings of Saturn should be visible in even the smallest telescope at 25x [magnified by 25 times].
A good 3-inch scope at 50x [magnified by 50 times] can show them as a separate structure detached on all sides from the ball of the planet. Telescopes are not inherently better at looking into space than binoculars.
Yes, astronomers' telescopes, with their gigantic lenses and sturdy support systems, are more powerful than binoculars you can carry. But it just comes down to size. Both tools rely on the same optical principles to do the job.
The main specification you want to consider when choosing a telescope is its aperture—the diameter of its main mirror or lens. The larger the diameter, the more light the telescope collects, allowing you to see fainter objects and more detail on nearby, bright objects like the Moon.
It is acceptable for observing bright objects like lunar details, planets, star clusters, and bright double stars. Its launch, now planned for October , has been delayed over 7 years. NASA is working to complete the telescope. How to see Jupiter in opposition. This titan of our solar system will be visible to the naked eye , and fairly easy to spot if it's a clear night.
It's also the brightest planet in our night sky, outshining Saturn by about 18 times. Your eyes are all you need to enjoy Venus's beauty, even from the city in heavy light pollution, but a binocular or telescope will surely enhance the view. Use a telescope of at least 60mm 2. Hawaii lies 4,km away from the closest continent, North America, making this the most remote archipelago on Earth.
The world's most powerful radio telescope has begun scientific operation. With no diffraction spikes to hide faint binary star components or smear globular clusters, refractors can often resolve close-spaced stars more precisely than the typical reflector.
Since the Moon and planets are all brightly lit by the Sun, a large light-gathering capacity is not as important as high magnification within the solar system. The relatively small aperture of a refractor therefore often has an advantage over a larger reflector-type scope for this kind of observing, as there is less glare from a larger scope's brightly lit planetary surfaces to wash out faint detail. For purely visual lunar, planetary, binary and star cluster observing, an altazimuth refractor with manual slow motion controls may be perfectly adequate.
If a family shares the telescope, however, an equatorial mount with a motor drive will keep objects centered in the field of view so all can share the same view. Close-up lunar and planetary photography generally requires such a mount and motor drive. Thanks to the increasing availability of economically-priced high-sensitivity DSLR and CCD cameras for astrophotography, moderate-aperture short focal length refractors are becoming increasingly popular for wide-field deep space nebula and galaxy photography.
This gives reflectors a much better light capturing potential than refractors for dimmer and farther away deep sky objects. You can think of collimation as a bit like tuning a guitar.
A guitar out of tune is not a pretty thing, and neither is a telescope un-collimated. Most instruction manuals that talk about collimation are written with the hardcore astronomer in mind, covering every possible tweak you could imagine. All you are trying to do when collimating your reflector is to make sure the eyepiece is aimed at the center of the primary mirror, and that the primary mirror is aimed at the center of the eyepiece.
There are plenty of YouTube videos showing you how to collimate your scope and you can probably find one for your specific make and model. Collimation can and should be performed in the daytime until you are familiar with the process. Some will argue that in a battle between a 6-inch reflector and a 4-inch refractor, the reflector will win on planetary viewing. And of course, this varies from telescope to telescope, and whether your reflector is properly collimated and has been left outside long enough to reach the ideal temperature that night.
A refractor for planetary viewing, and a reflector for deep sky objects such as nebulae and galaxies. They can be the weak link in your viewing experience and they may be the first thing that you want to upgrade.
When you upgrade, it can feel like you have bought a brand new, higher quality, telescope. In most cases, you will have a 1. If you have a 2-inch telescope barrel, you can buy an adapter that allows you to use the more common 1. Before you use your first telescope you might picture that you press your eye always into the eyepiece the way you do with binoculars.
Eye relief is the distance away from the eyepiece that you need to position your eye to get the correctly focused view. An eyepiece with a short eye relief will require you to put your eye to the eyepiece itself, which can become uncomfortable over longer periods of time.
A Barlow lens, because it increases the magnification of your eyepiece, allows you to use a lower magnification eyepiece with better eye relief to achieve the same magnification. This might also come as a surprise if you wear eyeglasses. You can adjust the focuser on the telescope to match your short or long-sightedness without having to wear your glasses.
If you have astigmatism, then you might need to wear your eyeglasses, and then you will need a longer eye relief so that your glasses can fit in the gap between the eyepiece and the correct distance for the proper focus. In this case you can buy longer eye relief eyepieces. They are expensive, but they do exactly what you need. Firstly, to re-use the analogy of digital cameras, you can use computer software to zoom into a megapixel photograph as much as you like.
But how long is it before the image becomes fuzzy any unrecognizable? Remember — your telescope is only collecting so much visual information from the light that enters it. So many megapixels, if you will.
Zooming-in increases magnification but also increases fuzziness — just like a digital photograph under extreme zoom.
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