Any amateur astronomers here?

[Swikes7]

I always love looking up the night sky but rather than just looking with the naked eye I would like to buy a telescope. I want something that I can look through and see some detail and not just a larger bright dot that I can see normally. Budget probably around £300 - £500. What would you recommend?

[Nicks90]

Stars are bright dots even with hubble. Really depends what you want to view,

Planets and the moon dont need massive aperture, but do benefit from longer focal length. Refractor type scopes are best for this
Deep sky objects need biiiig aperture and short 'fast' focal lengths - Reflector scopes are best for this, known as light buckets.
Bigger reflector scopes (8" / 200mm mirror amd above) will show good detail on clusters and even some good detail on galaxies and nebula. But ignore what you see in astrophotography as you are NOT going to see that - or any colour - with a normal telescope

Mounting your scope on a tripod that is suitable and stable will take up half of whatever budget you decide on. Yes, really. Nothing worse than a lovely scope lined up with Saturn and all you see is a jittery squiggle because there is a 0.5mph gust or the vibration from you shifting one foot to the other causes the scope to micro wobble. Yes it can be that sensitive
And eye pieces will take the other half of your budget. Yes, really. No point having 5 grand of hand crafted japanese triplet lenses in an unobtainium baffled scope of you are looking through a bit of cheap Taiwan recycled pressed glass eye piece.

Oh that leaves nothing for a telescope. Welcome to astronomy mission creep!


Head over to stargazerslounge and have a read on the starting up with... section, it will give you some good pointers and has an active sale section

Edited by Nicks90 on Friday 24th April 21:23

[DoctorX]

Someone posted this a while back which gives some very good guidance:

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/196278-what-can...

[Nicks90]

DoctorX said:

Someone posted this a while back which gives some very good guidance:

https://stargazerslounge.com/topic/196278-what-can...

Yep, that's a brilliant starting point post.
And if I was you, id spend my money on a dobsonian scope. No equitorial mount to try and figure out, no wobbly under strength tripod and contorting about an ever awkward eye piece.
They are simpler, stable and much cheaper, leaving more of your hard earned going on the optics (and size of the optics!)
For your budget an 8" / 200mm skywatcher dobsonian scope and a couple of half decent eye pieces would be ideal.


For comparison, I have a 12" dob (it's huge and weighs a ton) and a range of moderately expensive eye pieces, but i rarely use anything smaller than a 25mm eyepiece, giving an apparent magnification of x60
For planets, I might push it to x100 with my 15mm eyepiece, but you really are on to a losing game trying anything higher, it's just not required once you 'get your eye in' on observing.
(Ps, magnification is focal length of the scope divided by the eye piece diameter. So 1500m / 15mm = x100)

Edited by Nicks90 on Monday 27th April 22:14