Don Pensack: Hi! This is Don Pensack at Scope City and today, we would like to talk about basic telescope usage, wherein we are talking about how to select and use a telescope. Basic telescope uses boil down to two things - they can be either land and sea use, where you would be doing bird watching, watching boats in the ocean or doing various types of land use, perhaps hunting.

That type of telescope is exemplified by the spotting scope; a spotting scope has a completely correct image, right side up, and correct left to right and almost always has a zoom eyepiece, so that you can zoom in on the target. This type of telescope is simple intuitive to use and usually fits a simple photographic tripod. Then there is the astronomical telescope; the astronomical telescope you see exemplified by these around me, and for those the image may not be correct in the sense of not being correct right side up or left to right. But when you are looking at objects in the night sky it doesn't really matter, and this type of telescope is the most appropriate for use when it's being used for the Sun or for objects in the night sky. Next, we will go into basic telescope types.