Recommend telescopes

In My Humble Opinion
1

Wife hit me up with the idea about a telescope for Christmas. She found one at bestbuy for about $300 that has electronics to be able to move directly to particular objects in the sky automatically.

While I’m not well versed, I know I would prefer to spend the money on good optics and better resolution than on fancy electronics.
I would think I would use the scope both for celestial objects as well as a “spotting scope” function to view things across fields and such (as well as take Picts perhaps).

So, what are some good brands? What are some good models to consider for this use? Still looking at the $300 price range.

2

I like that you would rather spend money on optics than electronics.

Telescopes vary in what they are good for.

Many astronomical telescopes invert the image, so things are “upside down” (if you are defining an “up” in space). Terrestrial telescopes such as spotting scopes and binoculars add prisms or other means to get the image right side up again.

Many beautiful astronomical sights are faint, and the biggest job of the telescope is to gather lots of light by virtue of a large diameter. The most economical (and still optically good) telescope for this is a Newtonian, which has a big paraboloidal mirror at the rear (to create the magnified image) and a tiny flat diagonal mirror near the front (to reflect the image toward your eyepiece as it would otherwise be in front of the telescope). If you want to see galaxies and nebulae, a Newtonian is your telescope, and you can get a small one for around $300. No way you can get another kind of telescope with the same light gathering power in that price range.

Some astronomical objects (planets and the Moon) are fairly bright, and a refractor telescope is fine for that. This is the familiar kind of scope with a main objective lens at the front. A $300 refractor is going to be fairly small in diameter.

Binoculars in that price range will be pleasant to look at the night sky with. You should be able to see Venus as a crescent, and see that Saturn has rings (though they’ll probably just look like little lumps or ears). Looking at the Milky Way you will probably be amazed at how many stars there are, and you will be able to see some beautiful star clusters.

What do you know about what kinds of things you want to look at?

3

Agreed. I would suggest you go to your local astronomy club and get first-hand experience and advice.

4

Electronics on telescope never work well as promised, and you end up spending $300 for a $99 telescope. Do the math and you’ll see how that works out.

For $300 you could probably get a small dobsonian, but I’d take Quartz’s suggestion and check in with your local astronomy club. They may even have models you can rent to try out.

5

Take a look at Telescopes 101.

A lot of good information there. 2 things to remember…

You get what you pay for.
More aperture is better.

The problem here is, while a Dobsonian will give you the most aperture for your dollar, it’s not really suitable for terrestrial observation.

A nice, portable Maksutovwould do nicely.
This has a flipdown mirror, and a straight-through viewing port on the back, so you can put anerecting prism on the back for [del]spying on the neighbors[/del] looking at birds and ships.

I have a Meade ETX 125 that is similar, and love it for quick looks around the sky if I think of something, and a couple of larger scopes if I’m in the mood to drive out to a dark sky area for a few hours.

Please stay away from the Newtonian reflectors you see at Best Scam, or similar stores.
They are cheap, Chinese-made, entry level toys and not worth your time or money.

While smaller scopes can suffice for beginners, they often disappoint in their optics, magnification, and imaging, making you not want to use it anymore. Craigslist is full of them.

I personally think an 8 inch scope is a minimum for actually finding and enjoying deep-sky objects, but that’s just me. I have larger and smaller scopes, for different purposes.

Quartz is spot on with his suggestion. Your local astronomy club members will be happy to have you out to the country to view differing scopes and setups, and guide you to purchasing the best scope for you and your needs.

6

Interested in a Celestron 4" refractor with no complicated electronics? I happen to be selling one. PM me if you want to talk about it.

7

My main question has been: what are good makes and models?

Is Celestron a good manufacturer? THis is the same manufacturer of the one I saw at Best Buy (Celestron - NexStar 114GT 500mm Computerized Newtonian Telescope)
Since its the Best Buy one, I suspect it isn’t good quality.
So I’m more interested at this stage in finding which manufacturers are good, as well as specific models.

I’m leaning toward a spotting scope…like this one (also a Celestron)Orion Telescopes & Binoculars: Official Site - Telescope.com (Celestron Ultima 100 22-66x100 Spotting Scope)

8

Celestron has always made quality products, but they were purchased by a Chinese company in 2005, and virtually all scopes under 11 inches are now made in China.

Meade has now done the same this year. I personally prefer Meade. I have 4.

Orion scopes are mostly made by the same company as Celestron over in China.

A variable power spotting scope is handy. I have one on a tripod right now to spot Comet Ison. I can also watch the Pileated woodpeckers that have woken me up for 3 weeks straight.

It’s not great, however, for most astronomical purposes. Even a 100 mm objective is just too small to gather the light you need to examine even the planets, much less deep-sky objects. It doesn’t mean you can’t see space stuff. It’s just not the right tool for the job.

With good binoculars or a spotting scope, you can see Jupiter tonight, and watch its four largest moons change position night after night. If you want to see the cloud bands on Jupiter however, you’ll need at least 6" and preferably 8 or 10".

That Celestron 114 Newtonian isn’t a good choice. It’s only 4.5", and will be low quality, and isn’t well-suited to terrestrial viewing. With a focal length of only 500mm, you will be limited in what you can see, because of the limitations of power (eyepieces) it has.
Like many things, stargazing is full of compromises. Get out to a star party with some locals this weekend, and see what you can see!

9

I hope to get to a star party this weekend, if I can find one. My wife wants to get me a scope for christmas,
she’s currently looking at this one:
Vixen Telescope VMC 95L 95mm w/ Mini Porta Mount 33923

Is Vixen a good brand? at 95mm, does it suffer the same problem that Ducati mentioned above?

I don’t think I’ll get so involved with stargazing that I’ll want to see a lot of distant objects, but I’d like to see the rings of saturn (not just blobby ears) and moons and banding of Jupiter. I will probably use it just as often to check shooting accuracy at ~100-200yds as well as checking out the birds and critters in fields

10

It’s a bit overkill for the range, OK for birding, but falls short for Saturn.

Here’s what an 8 inch scope can do…
Use Youtube to look around as well.

Of course a ***good ***wife wouldn’t tell you that you can’t have a nice, big, scope.:smiley:

11

Based on my experience, this statement from your link rings fairly true:

Using a 4.5" Newtonian reflector, this works out to about 270x magnification, but it depends also very much on what you are observing. With a bright compact object like the moon I could go as high as 300x, but with planets I wasn’t ever able to go higher than 150. With diffuse objects like open star clusters it was rarely worth it to go much higher than 50, based on the semi urban/suburban area from which I was observing.

12

I don’t work for them, but Orion Telescope and Binocular (telescope.com) has high quality stuff. I have a couple of pairs of binoculars and a few eyepieces from them and they’re all high quality and reasonably priced.

They have a series of 6" Dobsonian (Newtonian variant) in the $300 price range that look decent.

13

I have the Orion XT8 Dobsonian for the last 12-15 years. Just love it. It’s big enough to gather light for most targets, but still portable to put in the trunk of your vehicle to take it places like I did a few times…the 2012 annular eclipse (get solar filter cap for viewing the sun…you wont regret it). When I bought it back then, it was roughly $500, but now is about $350 for the “push to” (non computer). I learn alot more about constellations and locating objects via star maps if you want to learn how to star hop…then this is the scope.

14

Orion has kind of stripped its classic telescope down quite a bit. They have been concentrating on the Push-to computerized line. The classic only comes with one eyepiece, a red-dot finder, and no nav knob or eyepiece holder. By the time you add enough items to it to get it up to snuff you might as well have bought the Intelliscope model.

15

Bummer…are the optics still good?

16

Oh yes. They are excellent. Nothing wrong there just that they aim the basic dobs at more experienced astronomers for whom this is their 2nd or 3rd telescope and so already have some eyepieces, etc.