Telescope for beginners
You want to purchase telescope for beginners. We’re here to make that process as easy and painless as possible. People always have questions about whether they want to get a telescope, but they’ve never had one before, so what telescope do they got, and the answer is always the same; it depends on what you want to do with it. Most people don’t know that different telescopes are built for doing other things. For example, some telescopes you actually can’t look through; they’re made for only taking pictures doing astrophotography. On the flip side, some telescopes are awesome at looking through, but they suck when you try to take photos through them. Most importantly, there are lots of telescopes out there on the market that will waste your time, energy, and money. So, I want to help you avoid getting a very frustrating telescope that you’ll never want to use.
Telescope to avoid
If there is something that you walk away from, it should be these telescope types to avoid at all costs. The first one is any telescope for beginners that has the word EQ in it or boasts an EQ-style mount. EQ is just short for Equatorial, a coordinate system that astronomers use. You can think of it as a latitude and longitude coordinate system, but for the sky now this is useful for professional astronomers and advanced amateurs and astrophotographers, but for beginners just wanting to point at things in the sky and explore, it’s completely useless and you don’t need it. Don’t be fooled by the low cost of EQ telescopes; they’re cheaply made, and they make it complicated to do simple tasks like just pointing somewhere and looking. Using these telescopes will make you feel like one of those people in an infomercial struggling to do the basic jobs. The next telescope type you should avoid is department store telescopes. These are the ones that come in the boxes you see on shelves in department stores. If you thought EQ ones were cheaply made, these are even worse. It feels like if you knock it over, it will break in half. That’s how bad these are. A lot of the time they will put pretty pictures of planets like Jupiter or galaxies on it to make you think that’s what you’re going to see when you look through them, but what they don’t tell you is that those pictures on the boxes are from professional telescopes. The last telescope for beginners you should avoid is these humongous, go-to-style computerized telescopes. Now it may seem like they have a lot of fancy techs inside of them, but a lot of the technology that’s in these humongous telescopes is from stuff that was made in the 2000s, and on the user manuals of some of these things, it’s like a freaking novel.
Smart Telescopes
Let’s talk about the telescopes we’d recommend to beginners, we’ve broken them down into multiple categories, so let’s start with the first one, smart telescopes. So, you’re probably asking yourself, what is a smart telescope? Smart telescopes are the latest in amateur astronomy technology. These are computerized telescopes controlled by an app on your phone or a tablet, and they’ll automatically point themselves toward objects in the night sky. But the big difference between these and a traditional telescope is that it replaces the eyepiece that you look through and instead puts a built-in camera that takes photos of the objects for you and sends those photos back to your phone or tablet. Because it’s taking photos, it’s able to pick up more detail on these deep space objects than you ever would looking through the traditional electronic eyepiece. Even if you were looking through some of the biggest telescopes in the world, you still wouldn’t be able to see as much detail as a camera would be able to pick up like the ones in these smart telescopes. It makes Smart telescopes insanely good for giving views of deep space objects like nebulae, galaxies, and star and star clusters. Things like, the built-in app features also make it easy for you to learn the night sky and explore the night sky using the smart telescope, so this is perfect for both kids and adults who want to explore the stars while also using the latest in technology. One of the downsides to these smart telescopes is that because of their limited size, they’re not ideal for looking at planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Mars, and other objects like that. Also, some people might not want to explore the night sky by looking at their phone screen. Some people want that traditional feeling of looking through an eyepiece and seeing the object. We’d recommend checking out the ZWO SEESTAR S50 or the DWARFLAB DWARF II smart telescopes. If you have the budget and you want to go all in on these smart telescopes, take a look at the ones from bonus like the VAONIS VESPERA II.
Best Telescopes type
If smart telescopes aren’t appealing to you, and you’re more interested in the classic experience of putting your eye up to an eyepiece to see your targets directly and explore the night sky independently, then a visual telescope is the ideal choice. When it comes to visual astronomy, bigger telescopes are generally more effective. You can think of telescopes as buckets collecting rain: the larger the bucket, the more rain it can hold. Similarly, the larger the telescope, the more light it collects from the target, enhancing detail and brightness. A larger telescope collects more light from an observed object, which increases the detail and brightness of the image. This capability makes the Dobsonian-style telescope, or ‘Dob’ for short, the recommended choice and the ‘king’ of visual astronomy. When people think of telescopes, they often imagine Galileo using a long-tubed telescope with lenses. However, the Dobsonian telescope uses mirrors, as it is a reflecting telescope. These mirrors can be manufactured much larger and at a fraction of the cost of glass lenses. This affordability allows enthusiasts to acquire large telescopes. Dobsonian telescopes offer exceptional views of the Moon and planets. These telescopes can also provide views of deep-space objects, such as galaxies and nebulae; however, observing these objects requires a dark-sky location.
Best Telescopes for beginners
Let’s talk about the best overall visual telescope for beginners we could recommend to anyone, and that’s going to be the Sky-Watcher Heritage 130 mm Tabletop Dobsonian Telescope. Now other manufacturers make tabletop Dobsonian telescopes, like Celestron has its Starsense and Astronomers Without Borders has its telescope. Any one of those is a perfect choice for starting with visual astronomy. It comes with additional eyepieces so you can get different magnifications and zoom in on some targets. The best part about these style telescopes is you get that big aperture and that big light-collecting power while still having a small, physically structured size. It makes it easy to move around, it makes it easy to maneuver, and it makes it easy to transport, so if you are going to those dark-sky places, you’re not lugging this huge telescope around. If you want to get into visual astronomy, this is the telescope for beginners we would recommend you start with.
Big Telescopes for beginners
Some of you may not care about the compact size of the tabletop Scopes, and maybe you live in a place that doesn’t have light pollution, so you can already get those views. You don’t need to travel, so want a big telescope for beginners that you might want to wheel in and out of your garage. If that’s the case, then let’s talk about the next category, which is big is big telescopes. If going big is the name of the game for you, we’d recommend having a mirror size of 130 mm, which is about 5 inches, and we call that the aperture of the telescope, but maybe you want to go bigger, and if you do want to go bigger, then we’d recommend these Sky-Watcher 12” Flextube Dobsonian telescope that can go up to 12 inches, more than double the size of the tabletop telescopes. Whatever the case is, you want to get the Dobsonian-style telescope because you can get it big for a low cost. Low cost is a relative term, of course, but if you want a big 12-inch refracting telescope for beginners, the ones that use lenses, you’re probably going to be spending on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars to get one built. One thing to note about the Dobsonian telescopes is that they use mirrors. The mirrors can sometimes become misaligned, which degrades the sharpness of the target or object you’re looking at. You can realign the mirrors in a process called collimation. It’s a simple process, but it’s something to be aware of now. Maybe looking through it isn’t your biggest priority and you’re more into the aesthetic of telescopes or you want your telescope to make your room look good, and let’s be honest, you don’t care about how it performs. We always recommend shiny brass-looking telescopes. They have a certain, like, dark Academia aesthetic to them, which a lot of people find pleasing, and you can find them at a range of prices, from cheap ones that are around $100 up to thousands of dollars for really nice handcrafted ones, so it’s really up to you that you would want.
