Author: Jessie Ray

At the time that I am writing this article, we have Christmas coming up. That means that people will be looking for telescopes as gifts for kids or family members who are interested in astronomy. This article is intended to help you make a good decision on an optical instrument that is going to last your loved one for many years and be a joy to use. This is a complicated subject, so by necessity this article is a bit long. Please bare with me and read to the end.

It can be hard to recommend specific telescopes since there are so many out there. I will put a few down below for your reference. I have no affiliation with any of these companies, these are just suggestions. It is actually easier for me to tell you what NOT to buy. That is what I will start with, beginning with the list below.

Rules for what not to buy

• Anything that advertises magnification rather than aperture
• Anything with wording like “great for kids”
• Anything from a department store like Walmart, Costco, Hobby Lobby, ect
• Any large telescope on a very small mount or camera tripod
• Any crazy barlows (anything exceeding 2 or 3x) or very high power eyepieces (eyepieces with focal lengths less than about 10mm)

Now for the reasoning behind these. All of these points can usually be found in the same class of telescopes. They are cheap, usually made of plastic (even the lenses), and come with TERRIBLE mounts. If you need to know anything about telescopes it is that you need a good mount to use one otherwise they are completely useless. A great optical tube on a flimsy mount will reduce its use to a showpiece object you have in your living room because looking through it will be a painful experience.

Things to look for

• The aperture as the main selling point
• Metal construction
• A sturdy mount
• Vixen compatible dovetail

These are the most basic points of looking for a telescope. To clarify a bit of verbiage, a telescope is the whole unit which includes the optical tube and the mount. Generally you want the largest aperture you can get, a metal construction for rigidity, and a sturdy mount. The aperture and the mount are the most important and are directly related since a larger aperture telescope is proportionally heavier.

My recommendation is actually to start with a decent pair of 7×50 or 10×50 binoculars and a tripod. Even a cheap photo tripod can generally handle binoculars of this class and binoculars are simply small telescopes. I have another article about binocular astronomy if you want to read more about that. But I am assuming that if you are reading this article then you are in the market for a telescope specifically and I will not try to sway you from that, though I will state again that binoculars are simply the best place to start with visual astronomy.

The first thing you are going to encounter is the choice between a computerized go-to mount or a manual mount. This is mostly up to personal preference, but personally I would recommend that a beginner stays away from go-to mounts until they have a good grasp on the sky as a whole. The reason for this is that you actually need to know a bit about the stars to get the mount set up each night because you have to align the mount with reference stars in the sky so that it knows where it is pointing. Even then the pointing is not always 100% accurate and you need to know how to star hop to find what you are looking for. So I recommend a manual mount, a star atlas, and a planisphere for beginners.

Next you will need to choose the type of optical tube to buy. These come in several shapes and sizes but the two most common for beginners are refractors or Newtonian reflectors. The other most common types of optical tubes are Schmitt-Cassegrain and Maksutov-Cassegrains, but they have such extreme focal lengths (the specification that determines magnification) that they are generally not very beginner friendly so I would stay away from them. For a complete beginner, my personal recommendation would be a small-ish refractor in the 80-100mm range with a focal ratio of around f/5 or f/6. Most telescopes have this listed as f-ratio, but you can calculate it by dividing the focal length in millimeters by the aperture in millimeters. So, for an 80mm f/5 that would look like 80/400=5.

You are also going to have to decide what kind of mount you want. There are altitude-azimuth mounts, which go up, down, left, and right and equatorial mounts, which go north, south, east, and west. equatorial mounts take some practice to get the motions right since you have to change your thinking to cardinal directions rather than your own relative viewpoint so for a beginner I recommend sticking with an alt/az mount. They are simpler to both set up and to use, though they do struggle with looking straight up. You can always purchase a new mount later if you want. That is why I recommend getting a scope that comes with a Vixen compatible dovetail so that you can swap it onto pretty much any modern mount meant for telescopes.

With all that in mind, my full recommendation would be an 80mm f/5 achromatic refractor (more on refractor types in a later article) with a manual alt/az mount and two eyepieces, a 10mm and a 25mm plossl. Generally you can find this in a package from the largest telescope manufacturers and there are plenty of them on the used market. This class of telescope is generally easy to find used because people think they are going to use them and then they don’t. Do some introspection to decide if that is you or not.

Speaking from the perspective of southwest Virginia, you can generally find these floating around the Facebook marketplace if you are patient enough, or the Cloudy Night classifieds page if you want a slightly more guaranteed result. With Orion and Meade (same company) closing their doors recently, your best bet to get a new version of the aforementioned 80mm f/5 refractor would be Celestron and their Astromaster 80azs refractor. In fact, most of the Astromaster line of telescopes look to be good ones and are all recommended by me, though again I would stick with the smaller telescopes on an alt/az mount for ease of use for a beginner.

For the more advanced

If you have a family member who has already started down their astronomy journey and for sure knows that they like it, then a larger and more serious telescope may be in order. This is going to require a bit more cash, especially if you are starting your telescope Christmas shopping in the middle of November since you will likely have to buy one new.

This is going to require a little bit of research on your part, and what I mean by that is that you are going to need to know what they already have and what their preferences are. The biggest thing to remember here is that larger aperture is almost always better so find out how large of a telescope they already have and go for something larger. If they like their current telescope, but the mount that came with it is giving them trouble you may consider getting them a better mount instead. If they have gotten to the point that they are familiar enough with their mount to be annoyed with it, then they are likely experienced enough to move to an EQ mount. Large EQ mounts tend to be cheaper than large alt/az mounts, so look for something in the eq4 to eq5 range. All manufacturers of astronomy mounts will have something like these in their range, and they often come in either manual or go-to variants. Again, that is mostly down to personal preference and use case but unless they intend to do astrophotography the manual mount is both cheaper and simpler to use.

So, how much larger of a telescope do you really need to get an upgrade? Well, any increase in aperture is going to increase both the resolution and the light gathering power (As well as weight. A larger mount is likely needed), but you usually need to go up in good sized increments for it to be noticeable enough to really make a difference. For example, if they have the 80mm refractor I noted earlier, they are probably going to have to step up to a 100mm or a 120mm refractor to gain a significant benefit. At this point, they are probably experienced enough to handle a longer focal length telescope, so you can look for something in the 900 to 1,000mm range, which at 120mm of aperture would be f/8.3. Celestron has you covered here as well with their Omni XLT 120 refractor. Several other companies sell the same telescope with a different paint job on it, so look around. Celestron sells it either as an OTA (optical tube assembly) which would be just the scope itself, or with either a manual or computerized equatorial mount. The manual mount the sell it with is passable, though potentially a bit undermounted for the long focal length so I would recommend going for the computerized telescope, the one using the Celestron AVX mount, simply because of its higher payload capacity. This will also get them a good starting mount for astrophotography if they are interested in that.

If they need something even larger, then I would recommend a 6 or 8 inch (150mm or 200mm) Newtonian reflector on a Dobsonian mount. These are actually going to be a bit cheaper than the large refractor on a computerized EQ mount that I just recommended (assuming you don’t get one of the go-to models of these) and will provide them with much more light gathering ability. An 8 inch dob can easily be a life-long telescope and is my number one recommendation for an intermediately experienced astronomer. When you move to a larger instrument like this, bright nebulae such as the Orion Nebula become detailed enigmas just begging to be explored. Bright galaxies reveal detail in their structure, and globular star clusters become buzzing bee hives of activity as you can now resolve many thousands of individual stars contained within them. There is a small learning curve since the mirrors have to be aligned, a process called collimation, but with a bit of practice that becomes a routine part of setting up and should only take a couple of minutes to check and make any tweaks. Don’t let it scare you. They also don’t do very well with pointing straight up due to the nature of their mounts, but for such a large optical tube this is a sacrifice well worth making.

There are many brands who make 6 and 8 inch (and even larger) Dobsonian telescopes, and they are all recommended, though I would caution you to make sure that the focuser is made of metal and not plastic. Some of the smaller scopes, such as the 6 inch ones, have a bad habit of coming with plastic focusers which will eventually break and replacements are hard to find. A few notable brands are Celestron, Apertura, and GSO. Again, Orion and Meade made good instruments but at the time of writing their doors have been closed so you will have to get one on the used market.

These are all of the recommendations I have currently for either a complete beginner astronomer, or for an intermediate astronomer who needs an upgrade, but they are by no means the only options. These are just starting points and my intention was to teach you enough about telescopes to start down the right path and keep you from spending your hard-earned money on something that is not a usable astronomical instrument.