Difference in Meade Telescopes, Reflecting or Refracting for beginner?

Question

I was planning to buy my telescope from the discovery shop and wanted to inquire about the differences in the following two models of refracting scopes


Meade 114EQ-AR Telescope for about $199

Meade 114EQ-ASTR Telescope for about $149

I was also wondering weather my first scope should be a reflecting or refracting? what are the major differences between the both in terms of keeping the hobby of astronomy insteresting for a beginner and sustaining enough interest to build on it.

A refracting model is

Meade 80EQ-AR Telescope for about $229

Hoping for an answer soon. Thanks to all

Answer 1

It's more expensive to make a lens than a mirror of the same size, so you'll usualy get more bang for the buck with a reflector. Refractors are generaly better for lunar and planetary work because they give sharper images and you don't need the light gathering power. Reflectors are more suited to galaxies and nebulae, where sharp images are less important but you need a bigger objective to gather enough light.

Answer 2

Your first telescope should be a reflector. The reason for this is because your goal should be to buy a telescope of decent quality with enough aperture to actually see some decent views. Aperture is the diameter of the telescope's primary mirror in reflectors, and lens in refractors and basically translates to the telescope's light collecting ability. The larger the lens or mirror, the more light you can collect, and the more objects are made visible to you. Larger aperture generally also means the telescope can reach higher magnifications without compromising image quality.

Reflectors have a mirror in the back which is typically concave parabolic in shape, similar to a satellite dish, but the curve isn't so apparent. This mirror collects the light and bounces it, while focusing it, to a flat but tilted secondary mirror up front mounted in the middle of the tube with a spider vein. The light continues from there to the eyepiece in the upper front side of the telescope in the case of Newtonians and Dobsonians.

Refractors have a lens up front that collects the light and directs it to the eyepiece in the back of the tube. Lenses suffer from something called chromatic aberration which means that different colors of light focus to different points, creating some distortion in the view. Some refractors partially correct for this and they are called achromatic refractors. Some completely correct for this and those are apochromatic. Apochromatic refractors are expensive.

Any refractor you will come across in a retail store will very likely have no correction at all and the few that do will be achromatic.
They will also be too small to see much. In fact even expensive apochromatic refractors are reserved for mainly planetary and star cluster viewing.

The reflector does not have chromatic aberration and will have more aperture than the refractor so you will be able to see more.

The telescopes you listed, the Meade 114EQ-ASTR and 114EQ-AR are reflectors. The ASTR has a slightly longer focal length but the difference is so slight you wouldn't really notice.

Aside from the fact that the mounts aren't of particularly high quality and I generally tell people to save $200 more dollars and buy a decent used telescope, there is no reason why the AR should be bought over the ASTR. The number 114 is the aperture in milimeters, which works out to about 4.5" and will allow you to see a decent amount of things.

The Meade 80EQ-AR is 80mm in aperture, which is about 3.14"
This may seem like not a big difference but the 4.5" reflectors will collect more than twice as much light.


The Meade 80EQ-AR is a refractor and while it comes with some astronomy software, the only reason it's more expensive than the reflectors is because it's a refractor which uses a lens, not a mirror, and lenses are more expensive to make. This refractor does not list any correction for chromatic aberration and will offer less satisfying views than the reflectors.

Answer 3

you could have looked here:
http://www.meade.com/starterscopes/eq_series.html