| I've been shopping for my first telescope for about 18 months now (not entirely my first, I had an ok-quality small refractor as a child.) Every time I've read so much that I know for sure what type I want, I read something else that makes me question what I want. So it's a complicated decision! Install http://stellarium.org/ and get to know the stars from your location. Even if you end up getting a "goto mount" (where you enter the desired object and it finds it for you) you still have to align it so you'll still need to know and be able to find the stars it needs! So learning the constellations and stars is a must, you can get started on that before buying anything. Join https://www.cloudynights.com/ forum and read lots. There's a beginner area there as well. It's a very active forum. If it wasn't for covid, join a club and go to watch parties to actually test viewing through all kinds of telescopes. Consider carefully where you'll keep it and where you'll use it. If you have a yard where you can keep it in a shed and roll it a few feet away to use you may not care about size and weight. But if you'll be carrying it down stairs and commuting to a darker view site on a bicycle, priorities are entirely different. Seems like a Dobsonian is the overwhelming suggestion in this thread. Do consider that for example the Orion 8" Dobsonian is 41 pounds and over 4 feet long. Does that fit with your storage, transport and usage location constraints? Whatever you buy, don't get something so cheap that the quality is so terrible it makes you give up. What this calls the "category 1": http://www.scopereviews.com/matrix.html If, against all advice, you want to do astrophotography, this flips some of the requirements. For photos, spend most of your budget on the mount, not the telescope. In fact you don't really need a telescope, just a good mount and a DSLR camera (this is what I've been doing the 18 months I've been shopping for a telescope!) (I did finally get tired of analysis paralysis and ordered a telescope last month. A StellarVue 80mm triplet refractor. There are long lead times these days for telescopes so it'll be a couple months before I actually receive it.) |
Congrats on the new scope! Excellent choice. Welcome to the hobby. :)