telescopes?

sorry thought this the best place to ask as i presume most of you have them. can i get a good one for about £100, i have found one a celestron astromaster 114 eq reflector telescope what you think.

thats excellent, buy it and start scanning the heavens who knows WHAT u might see maybe Mars or Jupitor?!!

Buying telescopes is frought with risk if you don't know anything about them. Whatever you get, £100 isn't going to get you anything much better than a good pair of binoculars. For a properly informed answer to this question, I'd suggest you Ask Here.

You will probably be asked what your primary interests are. That is, do you want to study planets, stars and galaxies or satellites for example. The reason is that certain scopes do better at certain things. For general observing, a second hand scope costing £100 will probably be better than a brand new one of the same price. The bottom line is get the largest aperture (the fat end) you can afford.

WG3

In the UK Sherwoods has good prices and service.

If you're getting it for UFO spotting then you'd be better of getting Bino's, a telescope is way to hard to manouver and track anything but an "apparently stationary" object.

For astronomical work don't consider anything that doesn't have a computerised mount. If you don't you will rarely be able to find anything besides the planets, tracking will be nightmarish, you won't be able to do imaging and you'll see less than 1% than you would with a computerised mount. Using a telescope is not much fun without a computerised mount.

I suggest you consider buying the Celestron NexStar SE 4 scope for £299. It is high quality and has great performance, nothing else comes close for the cash. If you've got more money buy the 6" (or larger) version.

www.sherwoods-photo.com...

First as another has said, you want to state what you want to look at. Different telescopes have different attributes, so you want one suited for what you are viewing. There are three main types which are reflector, refractor, and cassegrains. Reflectors use a mirror to gather light and are the cheapest, but have reversed upside-down images and are very bulky. Refractors use lenses and have upright non-reversed images, and can be very high quality. The cassegrains are the best of both, incorporating both a mirror and series of lenses, which makes it compact, yet yields great image quality. They too have upright non-reversed images. Telescopes are pretty expensive, and for the budget you stated, you won't find much except for the reflectors, or dobsonians. You might want to look into spotting scopes, which are of the cassegrain or maktusov type. They are cheaper, and also a lot more portable. All in all it really depends what you want to look at. I like the orion, and meade telescopes, although they can run into the 1000's of dollars for a decent one.

www.telescope.com...

[edit on 5-7-2008 by Freezer]

Originally posted by northeastuk
sorry thought this the best place to ask

Gotta love a thread that starts with an apology.

That's what ya get for thinking.

Maybe should have posted this thread in the space exploration forum.