Telescopes

[becka]

I would like to get DH a telescope for his birthday later this month but I don't really know a great deal about them.

I am hoping to find a decent one for under $200. The ones with computer tracking, etc. look like they could be very useful but I was wondering if anyone here has any experience and can recommend particular models.

Thanks!

 

[Cindy B]

Edmund Scientific has some nice ones in their catalog. They did have some truly great ones in there.

 

[BobBrazeal]

Try:

Orion

Meade

Celestron

All of these have some very expensive telescopes but also have some closer to the price range in which you are looking. I will tell you that in that price range, finding a tracking telescope would be difficult. You would have to sacrifice quite a bit of diameter to get the tracking. Diameter isn't everything but it is important. The larger the diameter, the more light the telescope can gather. The more light it can gather, the more you can see with it.

Be careful when looking for the "computer tracking" on a telescopes. Just because they have a motor drive doesn't mean that they "track". They may just have a little keypad that allows you to move the telescope with the motor rather than just by hand. The tracking scopes, when setup correctly, will track objects as the move across the sky.

There isn't one best scope for everything or everyone. Some of it depends on what you want to look at in the sky, for example, the moon or planets or deep sky objects like nebulae, galaxies, star clusters and etc.

 

[becka]

Thanks for the info. I am going to check out those sites right now.

 

[Antonia]

Becka - I wanted a telescope so bad and so I bought myself a nice Celestron model. It was much harder to actually work the telescope than we thought it would be. We were pros at looking at the moon, but we were pitiful at finding other celestial objects. I don't know your husband, but just a word of warning from a former telescope owner - it takes a lot of patience and a lot of sitting out in the dark at night to work a telescope. We ended up selling ours because it became a dust collector and took up too much space.

 

[Cindy B]

My DH had one of those several thousand dollar model telescopes about 10-15 years ago.

He loved it, but got rid of it. It was complicated.