Does anyone know anything about telescopes? I think I found a good starter one but I'm not sure. I don't know what I should be looking for?

Telescopes come in two basic varieties: short focal length, for viewing wide swatches of starry skies; and long focal length for primarily viewing planets and individual stars of interest (generally double-stars). For a starter scope, you really need to decide what it is you want to look at. Open clusters and larger galaxies are not going to be good through a long focal length scope.

Planets and double-stars are going to look like small dots through a short focal length scope. If you don't know what you should be looking for, you may not know what it is you *want* to be looking for. There are a lot of excellent things to look at in the night sky.

I suggest you begin by learning the night sky, and learning what the best things are to look at. With that in mind, I recommend the book "Turn left at Orion. " In addition, I recommend a good pair of binoculars, something like 7x35 would be ideal.

There are many ways to go with a first scope. Things you should consider are: (1) Things in the night sky tend to be very dim, and generally unimpressive (if visible at all) through inexpensive smaller instruments. For this reason many recommend getting the largest aperture you can afford, which typically comes in the form of a Dobsonian mirror scope, but these tend to be large.(2) Because things in the sky are dim and generally unimpressive when viewed through inexpensive starter scopes, many beginners get turned off quickly and give up the hobby, so spending a lot of money may not be a good idea, except that better equipment is usually far more re-sellable if you decide to leave the hobby.(3) You can't enjoy what you can't find, so if you're bad at finding things in the sky, you my do better with a scope that comes with a built-in computerized guide-computer and motors.(4) But half the fun can be learning the sky and finding out where things are in the sky, and guide computers and motors cost money that you could otherwise put into a larger mirror or objective lens, so others would recommend a simple non-motorized non-computerized scope.(5) A telescope is really only as good as the mount that it sits on, and very often the mount will cost more than the telescope.

Equatorial mounts will allow you to keep your scope on target with a simple counter-rotating motor, but for manually scanning the skies, others would recommend a simpler altitude/azimuth mount. So as you can see, there's a lot of different ways to go with a first scope. For much better advice, I recommend the beginner forum at cloudynights.com -People there will be happy to answer your questions about different types of scopes, and give you frank, if often conflicting, advice.

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