How to choose a beginners astronomical telescope

Apr 24, 2024Leave a message

There is NOTHING like seeing the moon, Jupiter, and Saturn through your own telescope.

A long 70mm to 90mm refractor, or a 114mm or 6" reflector, will be fairly inexpensive, but will be easy to use and will give decent views of the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, Venus, double stars, and other objects. And all these telescopes I mention are easily portable, although some are larger than others. None are heavy

Get a long telescope, not a short cute one. A long telescope will make it easier to see the planets.

And for your first telescope, get one on what is called an "alt-azimuth" mount, not an equatorial. Dobsonian telescopes are good by examples of having alt-azimuth mounts, but many other telescopes also have alt-az mounts, often identified by the letters "AZ" in the product designation..

For your first telescope I would recommend a 6" aperture size or smaller. Larger telescopes can be very heavy and clumsy to store and to move around.

And get a first telescope which is manually operated, not a GOTO or other electronically-controlled scope. Sometimes the computerized functions work and sometimes they don't, and even when they do work, they distract your time and attention from actually seeing things in the sky. The frustration can kill a person's enthusiasm for astronomy.

Get in touch with your local astronomy club, because they'll have advice, and sometimes they have telescopes to lend, or even to give away to beginners.

When you buy, I'd recommend that you buy from a telescope retailer on line, and not through Amazon. The astronomy companies will have better tech-support before the sale, and customer service after it, than the Amazon sellers.\

https://www.barrideoptics.com/astronomical-telescope/china-astronomical-telescopes-factory.html

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