Even better, free shipping is included. A bit unwieldy at times, this model can view dimmer objects in the deeper reaches of space. The 8-inch mirror, which is what captures the light, is larger than that of our top pick, and that means crisper, clearer images and the ability to see fainter objects that are farther away.
I consulted numerous experts for guidance while I researched what makes the best telescope. Mounsey has been a guest lecturer at astronomical trade shows and academic institutions, including Loyola Marymount University and El Camino College, and has taught astronomy at the Creative Minds Learning Center in Culver City, California.
He also founded the Oak Canyon Astronomy Group , which hosts star parties every month of the year. In addition, I spoke with Margaret McCrea, president of the Rose City Astronomers of Portland, Oregon, a nonprofit group that supports the public in pursuit of education and interests in astronomy, as well as with Greg Jones, another member of that organization and president of Eclipse Technologies.
Personally, I grew up around telescopes, and I've had a longtime interest in astronomy, but I still consider myself a beginner. My relative lack of expertise allowed me to get a fresh perspective on each telescope model we tested, flailing and making mistakes when setup instructions were not clear and learning to operate each telescope as though I were a complete novice—exactly the group we wanted to write this guide for. These telescopes are for beginning astronomers, and designed to help you become familiar with the night sky.
We wanted to find scopes that had the appropriate range to start a new astronomer out and then keep them involved. We spent over 20 hours scouring the Internet for every resource written about buying your first telescope. Aperture might be the most discussed component of a telescope. These criteria can be said to correspond to the strength and power of the telescope.
Bigger aperture most often means a higher price and a bulkier telescope. As Mounsey stressed, the need for a bigger aperture depends on where you are viewing from and what you hope to see. A larger aperture will in fact collect more starlight in any scenario, allowing you to view fainter objects. For our testing pool we did not venture into the much larger inch, inch, or plus-inch apertures, which are often so big and unwieldy as to deter many people from getting their telescope out and using it as much as possible.
At lower magnifications the image you observe can appear bright and in good resolution, whereas at higher magnifications the same amount of light is dispersed over a larger area, resulting in a bigger but blurrier image.
Think about the effect of blowing up an image on your phone or computer beyond its normal size. If you put a 10mm eyepiece on a telescope with a mm focal length, for example, your magnification power will be x. So a mm telescope, for instance, would have a practical magnification limit of about x.
As a general rule, the maximum amount of desired magnification for a telescope is 50x per inch of aperture. If you have our top pick, the Celestron NexStar 5SE, which boasts a 5-inch aperture, x is the highest magnification, or power, you should consider. Lenses are another consideration. A Barlow lens comes as an accessory with several of the telescopes we tested. All of the telescopes we tested come with a 20mm or 25mm eyepiece.
Most of the models we tried also come with a 10mm eyepiece. It may seem counterintuitive, but the 10mm eyepiece offers more magnification, producing an enlarged image and a smaller field of view. A finder scope comes included with a telescope and is normally mounted on the telescope itself. Each finder scope has either a battery-operated red dot or a set of crosshairs to allow you to align and center an object in its sights.
Next, we learned about the different types of scopes. In a refractor telescope, light passes through the lens at the front and travels directly to a mirror at the back of the scope and then into the eyepiece. Through this type of telescope, you can view objects both in the sky and on earth, because the image is not inverted inside the telescope. The trade-off is that this type of telescope generally does not do as well with faint objects in the sky.
A reflector telescope uses two mirrors instead of a lens to gather and focus light. Such models typically allow for higher image quality of faint sky objects. On the downside, reflector telescopes can gather more dust and debris in their internal components and require a bit more maintenance. A compound, or Schmidt-Cassegrain, telescope sometimes referred to as a catadioptric or Cassegrain telescope for short is a combination of two mirrors and one lens.
These scopes are best for viewing faint objects and can also work for viewing objects on earth. Finally, we familiarized ourselves with the mounts that scopes come on. At high power, you'll see that planets and stars shimmer and blur on most nights. The fault lies not with the scope but with Earth's turbulent atmosphere, and sometimes with very local conditions such as warm air rising from a nearby asphalt driveway that soaked up solar heat all day.
Astronomers refer to turbulent nights as having bad "seeing. Large apertures allow observers to pick out faint objects and fine detail on the Moon and planets, but regardless of aperture, the better the seeing, the better the view.
Everyone is thrilled by their first view of Saturn and its amazing rings, even when the sky conditions are mediocre. There are three main culprits: unrealistic expectations again , light pollution, and inexperience.
Any way you slice it, galaxies are faint. Our own Milky Way is a perfect example. Few sights in nature are as beautiful as its soft glow arching across the sky on a clear moonless night far from city lights. It is the stuff of legends, a sight familiar to all humanity before the electric light was invented. Telescopes cannot fix that.
They make celestial objects appear bigger, but they cannot make their light more intense. Fortunately for urban and suburban astronomers, many deep-sky objects are bright enough to shine through heavy light pollution, though you may need more aperture to see them than you would from a dark location. These urban-friendly deep-sky objects include star clusters, double stars, and small planetary nebulae. As for galaxies, urbanites still can see their bright centers; in fact even small binoculars can show the core of the Andromeda Galaxy from the middle of a major city.
Its light has traveled across intergalactic space for 2. Having gained an appreciation of a few important principles governing a telescope's performance, we can now explore the different types available. You'll be forgiven for thinking there's an infinite variety from the ads in the astronomical press. Yet for all their varied shapes and sizes, telescopes can be divided into three classes: refractors , reflectors , and catadioptrics.
A refractor is the stereotype of how a telescope is supposed to look — a long, gleaming tube with a large lens in front and the eyepiece at the back. When properly designed and built, refractors generally deliver sharper and brighter images per inch of aperture than any other design. In general, a top-quality 4-inch refractor shows deep-sky objects about as well as a 5-inch reflector or catadioptric, and might even do a bit better on the planets.
Most telescopes with apertures of 80 mm or less are refractors. Therefore, refractors dominate both the bottom end of the market, where people can only afford very small apertures and also the market for highly portable high-performance telescopes. Small refractors also perform to full capacity almost as soon as you bring them outside, whereas large reflectors and catadioptrics deliver mediocre high-power images until their mirrors reach the temperature of the outside air, which can take an hour or more.
For these reasons small refractors are well suited to those seeking a "grab and go" instrument or who have no desire to tinker with the optics. Unfortunately, refractors do not scale up well, for several reasons. The cost of building a good lens rises very steeply as the aperture increases — much more so than for mirrors. By contrast, a 6-inch reflector is considered rather small for a beginner, and many advanced observers own reflectors with mirrors 12 to 30 inches in diameter.
False color can be a serious problem for people who want to view the Moon and planetsat high power, but it can be minimized by using either long focal ratios or special glasses. For achromats , whose lenses are made with traditional flint and crown glass, false color is essentially invisible when the focal ratio is at least three times the aperture in inches.
Long tubes are especially problematic for refractors because the eyepiece is at the bottom of the telescope. That means that the pivot point needs to be above your head, and that in turn requires a tall, heavy, expensive tripod. These so-called short-tube achromats sacrifice a certain degree of high-power performance in favor of portability and a wide field of view.
Fortunately, modern technology makes it possible to combine the benefits of short-tube and long-tube refractors — at a price. Apochromats , or APO s, use lenses made with extra-low dispersion ED glasses and other materials to reduce false color dramatically. Not only does this alleviate the problem of overlong tubes, it also allows these scopes to deliver gorgeous wide-field views at low magnifications as well as flawless high-power images. APOs are also particularly good for wide-field astrophotography.
Apochromats used to be extremely expensive, but prices have come down significantly in recent years. The cheaper but still excellent! An ED refractor is now a plausible choice for a beginner who wants a rugged, portable, highly versatile telescope and is willing to accept the limited image brightness and resolution that are inevitable consequences of small aperture.
The second type of telescope, the reflector , uses a mirror to gather and focus light. Its most common form is the Newtonian reflector invented by Isaac Newton , with a specially curved concave dish-shaped primary mirror at the bottom end of the telescope. An accessory tray for eyepieces also makes for a good as a tripod-leg tensioner to help stabilise the setup.
The VX8 is affordable system, and with the rolled aluminium tube weighing 7kg and measuring just 86cm long, many will find this easy to transport and lift onto a mount using the tube rings and dovetail bar. Read our full Orion Optics VX8 review. Where to buy: Orion Optics. An altaz Dobsonian telescope makes for a great beginner telescope, as simplicity is the name of the game. The telescope tube comes with tube rings attached, but the rocker base on which it sits is a flat-pack and requires a bit of assembly.
Indeed, one of the great things about this scope is that you can set it up and get observing within minutes. This also helps take advantage of breaks in the clouds. Read our full Bresser Messier 8-inch Dobsonian review.
Where to buy: Bresser. This is helped by the light rocker box, which most people would find easy to move into an observing spot. A 32mm super wide angle eyepiece, mirror-cooling fan, battery box and a red dot finder complete the system. We observed Jupiter and found the planet snapped into focus and we could see belt and spot features.
We also observed the Ring Nebula and found all of these targets looked amazing. Where to buy: Omegon.
Maksutov-Cassegrain telescopes use mirrors and a front corrector lens to make for a compact, relatively portable optical tube. This long focal length makes it great for planetary and lunar viewing, but it is also good for observing many deep-sky objects, too. And, along with a tube width of mm, it really is quite compact. At just 7. We also attached a DSLR camera and were able to capture views of the Moon, as well as long, tracked exposures of deep-sky objects.
This is an instrument not just for visual observing, but can also be used for deep-sky astrophotography. The NexStar 8SE is an 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain boasting a focal length of 2,mm, fit into a compact orange tube weighing in at 11kg. It comes with a StarPointer red-dot finder, E-Lux 25mm, 1. Testing its Go-To and tracking system showed good results, and we found the the object we selected was almost always placed close to the centre and nicely crisp and clear.
Beginners and seasoned astrophotographers will also enjoy picking out detail on the surface of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — we highly recommend accessorizing this telescope with a range of filters for optimum results. The Celeston NexStar 5SE is quite portable, and since it's comprised of three different components — the optical tube, mount and steel tripod — assembly takes no more than about 10 minutes.
The Sky-Watcher Heritage P telescope, though a small package, offers some great features for those wanting a hugely portable instrument to use for astrophotography. This reflector comes equipped with a couple of fair-quality eyepieces 10mm and 25mm , but we do recommend adding a Barlow lens to the kit to ramp up the magnification.
What we can see through in the field of view, though, is sure to delight those just starting out in astronomy and astrophotography: there is a decent amount of contrast and clarity when capturing bright deep-sky targets, the planets and cratered lunar surface, especially given the reasonable price tag.
The mount provides a stable observing platform and will also track night-sky objects once located. The telescope can be slewed automatically in both axes, at five different speeds, via the mount's electronic keypad. Another standout feature is the Freedom-Find dual-encoder technology, which enables the telescope to be moved manually in either axis without losing its alignment or positional information.
This is enormously convenient and offers great flexibility during observing sessions. The telescope also includes a Canon-D electronic shutter release cable, enabling automatic DSLR control at up to six preset positions. If you're shopping around, or have a smaller budget, the 90mm Sky-Watcher Heritage 90P is also worth considering.
This telescope is a good example of one that is well suited to a particular area of astrophotography: due to its long focal length mm , it is best for observing and photographing the Moon and planets. So, if you know you'll be studying the rings of Saturn, imaging the Moon's mountains, craters and mare or chasing Jupiter's Great Red Spot, then the Sky-Watcher Skymax could be the instrument for you.
As we have mentioned previously, a Barlow lens will serve you well for astrophotography — this Maksutov-Cassegrain is supplied with one, pushing your magnification up by 2x and increasing your focal length for better observing and photography. In terms of build, the overall package is of a very good quality.
The optical tube assembly is a particular highlight, and we appreciated the excellent finish. The optics offered pin-sharp views of a selection of solar system targets with no coma, or other optical defects, hugely visible.
The Sky-Watcher Skymax is a great choice for those who are planetary and lunar enthusiasts. However, it's not well suited to long-exposure photography of deep-sky objects such as nebulae or galaxies. It's possible to purchase this telescope with or without a GoTo mount, depending on your kit preferences — whatever you decide though, a Vixen dovetail fixture means that the tube can be fitted to a variety of mounts, offering a great deal of flexibility for the astrophotographer. The Celestron Inspire AZ is our recommended telescope for the ultimate beginner, or for those on a tight budget.
Given the complete package, which features a 10mm and 20mm eyepiece, erect image star diagonal, accessory tray, smartphone adapter, Starry Night Software, red LED flashlight for preserving night vision and a StarPointer Pro red dot finderscope, you truly get more bang for your buck with the Inspire series of telescopes. Though its mount is a basic undriven alt-azimuth design, it will still enable you to get some impressive images of the lunar surface — which is by far the best initial target to try photographing.
As with the majority of instruments, the Inspire AZ's optics are multicoated providing good clarity for the low price tag. Color fringing is visible in images, but this is to be expected through the optical system of a budget telescope. The integrated smartphone adapter means you can mount your phone to the eyepiece to take photos.
You can also easily mount a digital SLR to the telescope with a low cost adapter this is available separately , although be mindful of the loading weight of this instrument when attaching additional pieces of kit. The Sky-Watcher Startravel is a great telescope, given the price. Not only do you get a decent-sized mm aperture, it also comes with a highly-respected EQ equatorial mount to make tracking a breeze.
Two eyepieces and a Barlow lens are supplied in the package, along with a fair quality tripod — although we did find the accessory tray to be fiddly to attach. On the whole, the instrument is easy to set up and use, giving you speedy access to a wide range of targets.
The mount features a DSLR shutter release port for camera control, but after our experience with it, the telescope itself is well suited to general observation and photography. The optics offer very impressive views of the night sky, with only a slight degree of color fringing that can easily be edited out with the right image editing software.
We feel that the Sky-Watcher Startravel is best for lunar and planetary photography, but it's definitely worth dabbling in deep-sky imaging, particularly the shooting of bright deep-sky targets such as the Orion Nebula Messier 42 and the Andromeda Galaxy Messier The Sky-Watcher SkyMax PRO features a long focal length, which makes it ideal for those who like to image the members of the solar system.
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