Rather than go into a lot of detail about Astronomy on my website (there are enough Astronomy sites out there already without me adding to them) I have chosen instead to look at some of the fundamentals of using a telescope.

The Celestron Telescopes website is another good source of telescope essentials. The Meade Telescopes website likewise can give you some good information on the various scopes available.

Many astronomy sites offer dire warnings to prospective astronomers about buying so-called “Department Store Telescopes”, dismissing them as being of no better use than as somewhere to hang your coat. While it is true of bottom-of-the-market models, those in the mid-priced range can be a good starting point for budding astronomers. Both Celestron and Meade offer reasonable quality telescopes in this area.

Spending all your money on a large telescope which ends up collecting dust in the garage is not a wise choice. As it is, from what images I have seen through my Celestron 130SLT Newtonian and through the once local Koolang Observatory’s 20” Newtonian telescopes, the views you can expect to get - even out of a more expensive scope - will never rival those shown in photographs taken from the Hubble Space Telescope or one of the number of deep space probes sent to Jupiter and Saturn.

If you are expecting such brilliant full-colour views as these from your own back yard telescope, then you will be sadly disappointed.

For a long time I dreamed about owning the biggest “light bucket” I could get, but then the practicalities like the telescope’s weight, portability and affordability brought me down from the clouds and back to earth with a thud. Rather than buying a “cannon”, get a scope that you will pick up and use regularly, then occasionally take the opportunity to visit an observatory, or join an astronomy club for those times you need an “Aperture Fix”.

There will be different opinions expressed about what type of telescope you should buy. Indeed many amateur astronomers will advise you to buy a good pair of bin-oculars to start with. They have the advantage of portability and wide field of vision, not to mention that, if you do lose interest in the hobby, a good pair of binoculars will find lots of other uses. Try to buy a pair which are around 7x50, which means they have a magnification of between 7-10X and an aperture of around 50mm/2”. These binoculars will be excellent for comet watching and for spotting, even if you do decide to go out and buy a telescope later on.

The earliest telescopes, such as the one used by Galileo to view Jupiter and Saturn, were Refractors. Sir Isaac Newton invented the Reflecting telescope, which became the basis of most of the large research telescopes like the Hale 200” telescope on Mt Palomar in California and the Anglo-Australian Telescope at Siding Springs near Coonabarabran, NSW.  (See below)

Even today, amateur astronomers are building on those earlier scope designs to make them even more compact but still more powerful.

Of the three types, the 8” Catadioptric is regarded by many as the best all-round telescope, giving good planetary as well as some deep-space object views. Even some terrestrial viewing is possible because the image is right way up, unlike Newtonians where the image is inverted.

Refractors are best suited to planetary viewing due to their smaller field of view while Reflectors are best for viewing faint deep space objects due to their better light-gathering capability.

With regards to what kind of telescope mount to go for, even though dyed-in-the-wool astronomers dismiss them as gimmicky, the computerized alt-azimuth style mounts are of benefit to newcomers, and Catadioptrics with these mounts lend themselves well to astro-photography.

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telescope mount