I'm going to spend about 120ish quid, I think thats $180 more-or-less. I have no idea about types and such. I have a 20x I got for free at the moment but can't see anything bar the Moon lol.

I want to see the rings of Saturn and the horsehead nebula. That's my aim! Please suggest, oh wise Massassi. I hear Orien telescopes are good..

Do you live inside a city?

Build one. I'm pretty sure you could probably build a better one for your budget than you could buy.

I wanna see the rings of Saturn too...

I live in the Bay Area. The first time I went to visit family in rural Wyoming I walked outside at night, looked up, and eyegasm'd.

It's kinda semi-rural all around my work. so there isn't very much light polution happening at night except for the warehouse lights. Everytime I get out, if it's a clear night, the stars are pretty clear. It's awesome.

I live in-between two cities, but I know people with cars and can easily drive out for half an hour. There's a massive telescope called Jodrell Bank about 40mins away, if the sky is good enough for that then my little telescope will be fine!

Build one, that would be very optimistic!

You're not going to see Saturn's rings with $120-$180 scope. I currently own a Celestron NexStar 6SE (scope and tripod = ~$1300) and with that I can get Saturn in view to about the size of a pea in your hand. Just good enough to see the rings, stripes on the planet, and a few moons.

Anything under $300 is probably not going to show you anything other than the moon, and stars.

Just a tip before you dive into the telescope world. When you go big on scopes, a lot more comes into play. Naturally, the light pollution, and clouds effect it. But wind and temperature can also ruin an otherwise great night. I've owned mine for four months now, only to have taken it out 4 times.

Ah thanks for the tips!

Again, as people have said, you aint gonna see anything with that sort of scope. Heck, the Astronomy community deresively refers to those sorts of scopes as "department store telescopes". Also, if you wish to see pretty much any nebula as anything other than a vaguely shaped grey blurr, you will need to get into astrophotography, which is another kettle of fish entirely.

I will point out that a refracting telescope (one that uses only glass lenses) is not going to be anywhere near as good as probably a simillarly priced refracting (uses mirrors as the magnifier) telescope.

But I would say that at your price range, you should look into any astronomy societies that are around where you live, because they sometimes do mirrior grinding for making a telescope. (you need to grind them by hand, because it is the only way to get random enough movement to get a smooth surface).

Save up a few extra pounds.

You'll need a Barlow to see much of Saturn, but with that scope you should be able to at least make out its rings, and spot most if not all Messier objects.

I'm not so sure about that one Roach...

Also, don't forget about tracking. Saturn only stays in the eyepiece for what, maybe a minute?

That scope looks really good! All the reviews on Amazon were top notch. Kind of wanted one to put on a tripod though...

Why aren't you sure about it, KOP? Orion is a pretty good brand for beginners, and Dobs are great for cheap aperture, as long as you're not wanting to take pictures.

I'd say at ~200x (which is about the max Goit'd want to go on that scope), Saturn would travel through your FoV in less than 30 seconds. He'll want to be sitting, and get used to small motions, but it's really not much more demanding than a microscope.

Yeah, that's the problem with Dobsonians, Goit, the mount isn't the most mobile. That 4.5" scope would fit in the trunk of a car, and you'd easily be able to take it camping, but hiking with it would be out of the question.

Here's a decent tripod scope.

If you got the bundle with the eyepiece, barlow, and filter kit, you'd basically be set until you wanted a much much bigger telescope.

Thanks mate, I believe this is what I've been looking for!

Woah there. Hope I haven't arrived at this thread too late.

Basically I want to warn you to seriously take your time in thinking about this and to do a heck of a lot of reading. Don't buy anything until you really know what you are buying, why you are buying it and what its downsides and niggles will be at the point of use.

If you buy the wrong thing, you will regret it and it may knock back your enthusiasm for astronomy (or kill it outright). You'll also feel like a plonker every time you look at the lemon you bought.

Another, more general, point, is to manage your expectations. You probably have an unrealistic expectation of what can be seen at all, how "good" it looks when you see it, and how easily you will be able to find things to look at them.

ESSENTIAL reading:
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/astronomy/astro21/sandt/startright.html

That site is pretty good in general, actually:
http://www.wwnorton.com/college/astronomy/astro21/sandt/backyard.html

A couple of good astronomy forums:
http://www.cloudynights.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?Cat=
http://stargazerslounge.com/

For whatever it may be worth, I waffled clumsily about telescopes a couple of years ago in a similar thread:
http://forums.massassi.net/vb3/showthread.php?54121-Telescopes-Advice

Finally, if you insist on a "what do i buy NOW?" question, I would suggest that you either :

- wait and save up more money so that you can buy the largest-aperture Dobsonian-mounted reflecting telescope you can both afford and physically cope with, perhaps something like an 8 inch f/6 (decent manufacturers include Orion, as mentioned, and Skywatcher)

OR,

- buy some 10x50 (ish) binoculars. Some prefer 8x40, some prefer 7x50, but that sort of ballpark. They can be hand held, are quick and easy to pick up and start using, and have wide fields of view so it is easy to find things (don't underestimate the importance of this), and might very well always be useful for other purposes. When you upgrade from the binoculars to a decent telescope you will still have a use for the binoculars. The wide fields of view allow you to scout ahead before you try to find something in the telescope's narrow field.

And fundamentally you get a different picture in binoculars. It's nice to look at things with both eyes at once, and an object shown in a larger context (in a wide field of view through, for example, binoculars) looks kind of different from that same object exclusively filling your view (in the narrower, high magnification you get with a telescope).

If/when you get a telescope, as long as you don't choose something with too little aperture, the objects you can spot in the binoculars will become a fair bit more impressive and the objects you can't see at all in binoculars will look, through the telescope, like some of the objects you could see in the binoculars. i.e. it'll give you a cheap taster of what much of this hobby is like, and if you are one of those who expects Hubble-on-a-stick and drops the hobby you'll still have a decent pair of binoculars for daytime use.

Another long waffly aside... Personally I find visual observing more fun than looking at photos, even if the photos were ones I had taken. There's something special about looking directly at something, knowing that the photons hitting your eye have travelled non-stop for hundreds or millions of years directly from the object. Plus photos can't portray the vanishing dimness of what it is you're looking at. I am sometimes impressed at the thought of what the human eye can detect - the tiniest difference between darkness and "something". A picture shown on paper or a monitor is not able to convey that tiny contrast.

If you want to look at photos you can google it or buy a magazine. But this is just my opinion and others would likely make a strong case to the contrary

Astronomy telescopes give an inverted image. Impractical for creeps.

They often are!


But do you really know why you want this? You might be making some poor assumptions. A lot of people overlook Dobsonian mounts without understanding them properly. They really are (for any given telescope aperture) very quick and easy to set up, and fairly easy to move. Take the telescope off the mount (which involves little more than just lifting the telescope), move the mount (pick it up as one solid piece which isn't all that heavy), put the mount down, go pick up the telescope and plonk it back on the mount.

You may find with an equatorial mount on a tripod that you can't be bothered to dismantle it every time. And it is a little bit more fiddly to put a telescope tube on an equatorial mount so that it is balanced well, than it is to just plonk it down on a dob mount pretty much pre-balanced. So either you'll start carrying it out into the garden fully assembled with the telescope on top of it (in which case it is a bit heavy and unwieldy) or you'll just decide, on some nights, that you can't be bothered with it at all. Which is not a good outcome.



Jodrell Bank is a radio telescope and the considerations for siting a radio telescope are different than those for an optical telescope. Plus Jodrell Bank was established decades ago and there's a lot more urban sprawl nowadays.

Not trying to be mean here, I am just trying to point out that there is a lot that you aren't aware of yet. And that it's risky to buy something from that position. People buying the wrong telescope quickly is an all too common story. I did it! Take your time, you have nothing to lose by doing so. Especially since Summer is just about to arrive - the short hours of not-much-darkness will mean you don't miss a whole lot by buying in August rather than May.

This is cool stuff, yay a new fun expensive hobby for me to burn money on!

Depends on the optics. I can be odd or even parity.

I am personally not a fan of Dobsonian style scopes. The size of them is the primary turn off. I guess considering the price range set, it might be acceptable. I prefer Mak-Cass scopes. I can put it in my tiny car, and take it where I need it. That's also specific to my needs though. If you're never planning to move this scope, a Dob would be great provided you don't mind manual tracking. Do they make automatic Dobs? Too lazy to look :D.

I would second binoculars first...I would go out and get familiar with the night sky looking for constellations and star clusters before buying a telescope.

The size of Dobs is kind of the whole point of them. They offer the best aperture-to-price ratios (this always matters: if you are willing to spend more, you can buy EVEN MORE APERTURE!), and score pretty highly on aperture-to-manageability. A Dob with a focal length of 1200mm, such as an 8" f/6 or 10" f/4.7, would fit across the back seats of most cars. For the larger models you can buy truss tube/flextube designs where the tube collapses to a smaller size for storage/transport (so it can still fit in most cars). And once you arrive at your destination, a Dobsonian mounted telescope is about as quick to set up as any telescope can be: Take mount outside, put it down, take tube outside, put it on mount (which really is as simple as it sounds), GO.*

*(collimation aside, but that isn't always necessary: depends on the focal ratio of the scope, the build quality, how much you care about precise collimation, how many speedbumps you drove over on the way to the observing site, and how good you are at collimation+what tools you have)

They do make automatic Dobs, though I hear that the quality varies. And I think there are also kits to fit goto/tracking to your own currently-not-tracking Dob, but I know next to nothing about it.

I guess "I don't like X... that's specific to my needs though" is the punchline here though. Telescopes can almost be like shoes, you have to find one that suits your needs and tastes and other people can't tell you what you WILL like, just what you MIGHT like. But if you don't research the options thoroughly before you buy, you will probably regret your purchase.

I was going to read up don't worry. I'm buying in a few weeks. I haven't had time to read this all yet, but I will when I get back from work thanks GHarris!

Be sure to post your final decision for us all to see

Just thought I'd revisit to say that I haven't got one yet, because I'm still completely baffled by the wide range out there. I am however getting used to the constellations and other basics. It's a lot of money to part with and I don't want to make a mistake. I wish somebody would just tell me what to get though, everyone I ask says a different thing. *head explodes*