Telescopes for Beginners

(pensive music) (ethereal music) - The most challenging part of getting started with astronomy like this is being able to easily point your telescope.

And so, we talked about Jupiter.

I always tell people to try and start with something bright that's really easy to find because people will buy a telescope, they'll set it up, they'll follow all the instructions, and they'll spend hours that first night, and they'll try to point at something.

And every time they look through the eyepiece, they'll see nothing.

And it is a challenge, getting your telescope set up, pointing at an object, and being able to see that object takes time and practice.

If you want to try this, I honestly really encourage people to learn the sky first.

Learn how to find Jupiter, how to find Saturn, how to find these bright stars because you're gonna need all of that information that first night that you're practicing with your telescope.

(pensive music) There are relatively inexpensive ones, and usually the inexpensive ones are all manual.

They might have a little knob that you turn in order to have the telescope move on the sky, but in general, the inexpensive telescopes require you to move the thing, point it, and lock it in place by hand.

The more expensive ones are all automated.

They have an electric motors, they move the telescope over the course of the night, they'll have a little computerized hand paddle that will help you find things.

But again, I warn people, they think, "Oh, I've heard it's hard to point.

So if I buy the more expensive telescope that does it all for me, it will obviously work."

But you still need that knowledge.

You still need to be able to, even with an expensive automated telescope, be able to point it at the beginning of the night.

So I generally tend to recommend that people start with the relatively inexpensive manual telescopes because even though they're a little harder to use, the more expensive ones still require those same skills.

And so you might as well make sure you know how to use it before you take the plunge and buy an expensive telescope.

The type of telescope I generally recommend to new people, there's a type of telescope called a Dobsonian.

And there are different brands of Dobsonian that you can find out there.

They're generally the best telescopes for the money.

If you set a budget for yourself, "I'm gonna spend this many hundred dollars," usually the best telescope you can get for that amount of money is going to be a Dobsonian.

I also tell people, "Sometimes, you might wanna start with just a good pair of binoculars."

The challenge with binoculars is holding them steady.

And so you can buy like a camera tripod mount that's designed to mount binoculars on it.

And so that's also a good thing to consider for someone who wants to break into the hobby is buy yourself a good pair of binoculars and a good sturdy mount.

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