How to Choose a Telescope

Don Pensack:This is Don Pensack with Scope City and in this segment we'll be talking about how to choose your telescope. The first thing that you should do is to set a budget for the telescope. You may not know how much telescopes cost and, so I would recommend that you visit a showroom in order to see, but if you already know what the size of your budget is, I would suggest that you plan at least $100 of that budget towards accessories with the telescope. Those accessories will make the use of the telescope a lot more fun and a lot more complete. The next thing that you need to know about telescopes is to choose the correct type of telescope for your use. If you are going to be looking at very faint objects in the night sky like galaxies, then you need a larger telescope and the size of your budget might be different. If on the other hand you are going to be looking primarily at the moon, and the planets, then may be the simple, small refractor telescope would be the appropriate type and of course the catadioptric telescope is perfect for both kinds of use. Now, the other factor that you have to take into account is convenience. How can convenient is a telescope to use? No telescope is any better than the one that is the most convenient to use. So if the big telescope, the heavy telescope is not the appropriate one for you to use and you'll never use it because it's too heavy, then a smaller lighter telescope would be the one that is appropriate for your use.

And if you have no clue as to which type of telescope or what size of telescope is appropriate for your purposes, you could probably find the location of a nearby dark sight where a local astronomy club may hold its annual or monthly meetings and go out and visit them when they have a star party so that you could look through a variety of telescope and come to the conclusion about what type of telescope you would like to have. And the next segment, we will go into is getting started with the use of that telescope.