What is the criteria to buy a telescope?

Answer 1

What spectrum you are interested in.
What resolution you need for a clear picture.
What practical setup will work in your area.

14" reflectors with CCD are quite good.

Answer 2

1. Aperture is king, NOT power. You would not want anything smaller than 4.5" of aperture and it's well worth it to buy a larger one if you can.

2. Expect to spend about $300 at least.

3. Buy a well known brand like Celestron, Meade, or Orion.

4. DO NOT buy a department store telescope, or junk telescope that advertizes itself by power, even if it is a well known brand. This is a low end model that should be avoided.

5. Make sure the telescope has a sturdy mount.

6. Don't fall for marketing gimics. Many telescope makers slap features like goto on otherwise crappy telescopes to entice people to buy them, but this feature is usually useless unless the telescope has enough aperture to get a decent view of the objects, and a stable enough mount to goto and track accurately.

Answer 3

Good telescopes are expensive. Start off with a good pair of 10X50 binoculars and a star chart. If, after several months of viewing and learning the sky, you are still interested go for something like a Dobsonian reflector. A 6 inch would be a good start. Not too expensive and will get ok views of the night sky. Use that for a year or so then you can decide upon either another reflector, refractor or SCT/maksutov with motor drives to track the stars.
Hope this helps... Happy viewing...

Answer 4

I used to have a friend who worked at a planetarium. He fielded questions about telescopes all the time, and had a standard answer which I'll share now.

Unless you can spend $800 or more, don't buy a telescope. You will have better celestial viewing with a good pair of binoculars and a tripod to mount them on, which will cost you less than $200. (Make sure the binoculars have a mount option.) And then you'll have a tripod to use with a camera or camcorder, and some binoculars, both of which can be handy.

My friend died 7 years ago, so the money figures may need adjustment for inflation.

Answer 5

There are three and only three criteria for buying a telescope; and the first two will dictate the 3rd:

1. Availability of a good viewing location
2. What you feel you want to do with your telescope
3. Budget, how much are you willing to pay.

1. If you live in the heart of a large, well-lit city you will have to travel to a good viewing location. Getting even a few miles outside of town profoundly improves your viewing. If you live in down town Chicago, spending several thousand dollars on a telescope is a waste of money, if you can't drive out into the country to use your scope. If you live in a reasonably low-light suburb, that should be fine for casual viewing. (This describes me, for example).

2. Having some idea of what you want do see will govern what type of scope you will end up getting. If you have your heart set on spending hours viewing the moon, the planets, and double stars then you will probably make a different choice of telescope than if you want to concentrate on taking good digital photos of dim, deep-sky objects likes galaxies and nebula. On the other hand, you may want to say, "I have seen the sombrero galaxy with my own eyes." rather than say, "Hey, wanna see a picture I took of the sombrero galaxy?" More of the amateurs I know want to spend time viewing both inherently bright objects like the planets, *and* dim objects like the Horse Head nebula (a real challenge!). Most are into casual viewing where ease and speed of set up are paramount. The thought of a scope that takes hours to set up, align, and cool down is generally very discouraging over the long run to the casual astronomer. I have two friends who take deep sky photography serious and they have permanently mounted scopes in enclosures (one is actually a small dome).

So, then, what are your choices? If you want to spend most of your time viewing the moon, the planets and double stars, then a high quality refractor or long focal length Schmidt-Cassegrain will serve that purpose well. If you want to photograph deep sky objects and get the highest quality results then a permanently mounted Newtonian, or Schmidt-Cassegrain, in an enclosure is your best bet. This can be done with a mobile set up, but you will compromise on the quality of the results; but that may not be an issue for you. You may not want the *best* photo that can be made; you just want a photo. If that is the case, then a good mobile Newtonian or Schmidt-Cassegrain with a polar mount is a good choice.

If you want to be a purely visual astronomer and you want to see "everything" both bright and dim, then a good polar mounted Schmidt-Cassegrain, or a dobsonian mounted Newtonian make a good choice. For the record, I chose the latter.

3. This leads to costs. Inch for inch (or millimeter for millimeter) a Newtonian reflector costs less than either a similarly mounted Schmidt-Cassegrain reflector or a refractor. A dobsonian mounted Newtonian is the least expensive. An 8" Zhumell dobsonian is about $360.00 at the moment. A 12" Zhumell is about $830.00. A 16" dobsonian Meade is $2,00.00. Dobs will require that you learn the sky, and how to "star hop." These skills take time to learn. Dobs transport well, and are easy to set up and take down.

Good Schmidt-Cassegrain reflectors usually come with auto-alignment and "go to" features. The scopes will align themselves to the sky given a few known target stars. Thereafter, you give commands to the scope's electronics to goto gaxaly "X", and in a few seconds or minutes, there it is. Nice feature, but at some cost. Celestron 8" Schmidt-Cassegrain with goto features will cost about $2000.00. However, you will get a superior scope, which is usually easy to set up, and use.

A 5" (127 mm) Meade refractor will cost about $1000.00 with a polar mount.

HTH

Charles

Answer 6

Times have changed, and decent telescopes - once rare, are now available and resonably priced. I have always enjoyed traditional refractor telescopes; but these are expensive in larger sizes; and, a bigger aperture size means a brighter image and greater resolution. The newtonian scopes are much cheaper and on dobsonian mounts they work great. If you can, get an 8-12 inch dobs, orion, meade, and celestrons have a few goods ones at very reasonable prices.

Answer 7

If u live in a large city the light will reflect off the moisture in the air and u will not be able to see much.

Answer 8

Mirror area. Quality of mirror figure. Tracking mount.

Answer 9

Try Binoculars first as the people above suggested.

Answer 10

Have enough money to pay for it :)