Choosing first telescope

The market is flooded with telescopes of different brands, sizes and in different price ranges; however, all of these telescopes aimed at fans. How not to get lost in this variety and to choose the telescope that will give you pleasure for years?

There are several simple questions you need to answer:

1. Decide where you will make observations. Best suited locations that are remote from the lighting of large cities. Think you have enough dark skies for observations in your region.

2. Be aware that the equipment will often have to endure, to configure. Are you ready for this?

3. Do you have a place where you store the telescope?

4. Whether the telescope extra power? Where can I get it?

If you have only an apartment balcony, try a small refractor or mirror-lens telescope of small diameter. They are relatively light weight, ease of setup and durability against light and dust pollution, have a very contrasting picture. Unfortunately, the refractors are quite expensive and prone to chromatic aberrations (the appearance of blue-violet edges).

If you live in a private house, you can pick up a copy with the pipe diameter to twenty inches. Best of all, of course, to watch the stars outside the city, then you can take a more sensitive telescope diameter. Here you can buy reflector, which has less contrast image than the refractor, but it is cheaper and aperture it is limited rather by your budget than anything else.

More expensive mirror-lens telescopes are compact, but heavy, their image is devoid of chromatism, but because of the reflections in the mirrors in them are high light losses and this type of telescope has a maximum time of thermal stabilization.

In addition to choosing a telescope it is important to choose the mount, where he will stand. There are two types of mount — Equatorial and azimuthal. Azimuthally oriented along two axes, is extremely diverse, are lightweight and take up less space when installed. However, they are not as convenient as the Equatorial, which are oriented on the same axis and in the absence of mechanization give a more accurate result.

There are also computerized mount, who themselves find the desired object and watching him. We must remember that computerized mount makes sense to use only with good, expensive telescopes, otherwise their effectiveness will be very small.