A Beginners Guide to Buying a Telescope
My first telescope was, to be perfectly honest, an absolute piece of garbage. It was a Tasco that I bought from a clearance rack at Kay-Bee Toy Store. It was a strange purplish color, made entirely of plastic, and stood about 4 feet (1.22 meters) high with the tripod fully extended. It was only a telescope in the sense that it made small blurry things into large blurry things when you looked through it. It was an utter disappointment with one notable exception: in the hour of use I had before it broke, I pointed it in the general direction of Saturn, and for a few brief seconds my fortunes aligned in such a way that I could see a small blurry dot with rings around it. Admittedly I wanted to see it so badly that my brain might have tricked me into thinking that’s what I saw, but either way I was hooked. Shortly thereafter, my poor, clearance telescope fell over and died, returning to the dust from which it came. I would have been sad were it not for sheer joy of discovery in that moment.
Since then, I’ve owned a handful of larger, higher quality telescopes made by reputable companies. And over the past 20 years I’ve made mistakes, some very costly, but gained a great deal of knowledge that I’ve shared with new astronomers. That’s why I’m writing this: to continue that tradition of helping people discover their love of the night sky. It’s the same thing some exceptional people…
