Buying Your First Telescope

Choosing your first telescope is like buying your first car. You ought to know a little about the machine and have at least a learner's permit before you buy. Get some experience before getting your own telescope.

TELESCOPE "DRIVER'S ED"

1. Find some amateur astronomers and they will show you their telescopes. Most cities have astronomy clubs that put on public star parties to show off their telescopes. Go to meetings and join because most astronomers enjoy helping new people and some clubs loan telescopes.
2. Pay attention to astronomical items in the news.
3. Go out and study the sky with your own eyes. Learn to recognize the constellations and locate a bright planet or star cluster. If you cannot locate and identify bright objects with your eyes, you will not find dim ones with a telescope.

THINGS TO CONSIDER BEFORE BUYING THE TELESCOPE

1. Your telescope should suit your needs, abilities, and budget.
2. You should be able to carry it around, set it up, operate it, and take it down.
3. Buy within your budget but avoid telescopes that cost less than $250 or come from a department store.
4. Buy the largest aperture (the diameter of the main optical element) you can afford and conveniently carry.

TYPES OF TELESCOPES

1. Cautious people often buy a refractor telescope because it looks like a traditional telescope. Refractors have a long tube on a tripod and you look into the eyepiece at one end through the bigger lens at the far end of the tube. Small refractors are easy to carry and set up.
2. The Newtonian reflector telescope is more popular and a better dollar value. Light enters the tube, reflects off a parabolic mirror at the bottom, up the tube to a second mirror that squirts the light out to the eyepiece on the side near the top of the tube.
3. The catadioptric telescopes are combinations of refractor and reflector technologies and are more expensive and compact. Schmidt-Cassegrain and Maksutov arrangements are most popular.

TELESCOPE MOUNTS

1. The altitude-azimuth mount is the simplest and easiest to operate, just swing it left or right and up or down.
2. A special form of the "alt-az" for Newtonian reflectors is the "Dobsonian" mount that relies on gravity and Teflon bearings to create a very stable and inexpensive mount.
3. The equatorial mount is more expensive but helps the observer deal with the Earth's rotation. The sky appears to rotate, moving your target across the field of view. The equatorial mount compensates for this rotation, using an electric motor
4. Motorized mounts can be simple elctric motors or complex computer involved systems that can find things in the sky for you.

WHICH WAY TO THE TELESCOPE SHOWROOM?

1. Most large cities have actual telescope stores.
2. Many astronomers buy their telescopes through the mail. Popular astronomy magazines feature many pages of ads for mail order telescope companies. Catalogs are excellent sources of information, such as that for Orion Telescope Center (free catalog 1-800-447-1001).
3. A growing number of amateur astronomers build their own telescopes. You can build a Dobsonian telescope with basic woodworking skills and there are several books on the subject. If you are a skilled machinist or interested in grinding your own optics, the sky is the limit.

GOOD CHOICES FOR A FIRST TELESCOPE

1. A good pair of binoculars
2. A six- to eight-inch Dobsonian Newtonian reflector
3. An 80mm refractor on a sturdy mount
4. Four- to eight-inch Schmitt-Cassegrain on an equatorial mount