The BEST Telescope for Beginners (What You Need to Know)

so you want to buy your first telescope huh what's up I'm Ian and I'm here to make that process as easy and as painless as possible I've been working with telescopes for over a decade and after I got my undergrad in astrophysics I went to work in the telescope industry where I put systems together for places like NASA JPL professional observatories and tens of thousands of everyday people wanting to get into astronomy and doing that allowed me to see the pros and cons of every setup imaginable people always ask me Ian I want to get a telescope but I've never had one before so what telescope do I get and my answer is always the same it depends on what you want to do with it most people don't know that different telescopes are built for doing different things for example some telescopes you actually can't look through they're made for only taking pictures doing astrophotography on the flip side there are some telescopes that are awesome at looking through but they suck when you try to take photos through them most importantly there's lots of telescopes out there on the market that will waste your time your energy and your money so I want to help you avoid getting a telescope that's so frustrating that you'll never want to use it now look I know a lot of you are going to watch this video listen to me talk and then not take the advice that I give here and that's fine I get it it happens I do that too on gear videos that I watch if there is something that you walk away from with this video it should be these telescope types to avoid at all costs the first one is any telescope that has the word EQ in it or boasts an EQ style Mount EQ is just short for Equatorial and it's a coordinate system that astronomers use you can think of it as a latitude and longitude coordinate system but for the sky now this is useful for professional astronomers and advanced amateurs and astrophotographers but for beginners just wanting to point at things in the sky and explore it's completely useless and you don't need it don't be fooled by the low cost of some of these EQ telescopes they're cheaply made m produced and they make it really complicated to do simple tasks like just point somewhere and look using these telescopes will make you feel like one of those people in an infomercial struggling to do basic tasks the next telescope type you should avoid is what we call department store telescopes these are ones that come in the boxes you see on shelves in department stores if you thought that the EQ ones were cheaply made these are even worse it feels like if you knock it over it's going to break in half that's how bad these are a lot of the time they'll put pretty pictures of planets like Jupiter or galaxies on it to make you think that's what you're going to see when you look through them but what they don't tell you is those pictures on the boxes are from professional telescopes look at this one here this galaxy it shows isn't even a real photo it's just artwork and then it shows you can use your phone to take pictures look at the photo this is a picture of Earth the last telescope type you should avoid is these humongous go-to style computerized telescopes now it may seem like they have a lot of fancy Tech inside of them but trust me a lot of the technology that's in these humongous telescopes is from stuff that was made in the 2000s and don't get me started on the user manuals of some of these things they're like a freaking novel I've written a lot of stuff that's in these user manuals you don't want to read these trust me let's talk about the telescopes I'd recommend to beginners and I've broken it down into multiple categories so let's start with the first one which is smart telescopes so you're probably asking yourself Ian what the heck is a smart telescope smart telescopes are the latest in amateur astronomy technology these are computerized telescopes controlled by an app either on your phone or a tablet and they'll automatically Point themselves towards objects in the night sky but the big difference between these and a traditional telescope is it replaces the eyepiece that you look through and instead puts a built-in camera and it takes photos of the objects for you and sends those photos back to your phone or tablet because it's taking photos it's able to pick up more detail on these deep space objects than you ever would looking through the traditional eyepiece even if you were looking through some of the biggest telescopes in the world you still won't be able to see as much detail as a camera would be able to pick up like the ones in these smart telescopes this makes Smart telescopes insanely good for giving views of deep space objects like nebulas galaxies star clusters things like that the built-in app features also make it easy for you to learn the night sky and explore the night sky using the smart telescope so this is perfect for both kids and and adults who want to explore the Stars while also using the latest in technology one of the downsides to these smart telescopes is because of their limited size they're not ideal for looking at things like planets like Jupiter Saturn Mars and things like that also some people might not want to explore the night sky by looking at their phone screen some people want that traditional feeling of looking through an eyepiece and actually seeing the object if the smart telescope sounds like a smart choice yeah I said that I'd recommend checking out the ZW SE star or the dwarf Labs smart telescopes if you have the budget and you really want to go all in on these smart telescopes take a look at the ones from Bonas like the vasper if these smart telescopes aren't really your thing and you're more interested in getting that classic feeling of putting your eye up to an eyepiece and actually seeing the targets that you're looking at and you want to explore the night sky on your own then a visual telescope is the way for you when it comes to visual astronomy bigger is always better you can think of telescopes as buckets trying to collect as much rain as possible the bigger the bucket the more rain you're going to collect now just replace the bucket with the size of the telescope and replace the raindrops with the light coming from whatever Target you're trying to look at the bigger the telescope the more light you're going to collect from whatever object you're looking at which means you're going to get more detail and more brightness from that Target this is what makes the telescope type that I recommend to people the king of visual astronomy and we call this a dobsonian style telescope or dob for sure when people hear the word telescopes they usually think of Galileo looking through one of these long tubed telescopes that uses lenses but the dobsonian telescope uses mirrors because it's a reflecting style telescope you can manufacture these mirrors bigger and bigger for a fraction of the cost than you could a normal Glass Lens that means you can get big telescopes for an affordable price these dobsonian telescopes are insane when you look at things like the moon and the planets that is incredible these telescopes can also give you views of deep space objects like galaxies and nebula but you have to go to a dark sky location first in order to see these things with that let's talk about the best overall visual telescope I could recommend to anyone and that's going to be the skywatcher Heritage line of tabletop dobsonian telescopes now there are other manufacturers who make tabletop dobsonian telescopes like Celestron has their star sense and astronomers Without Borders has their telescope any one of those is a perfect choice for starting out with visual astronomy it comes with additional eye pieces so you can get different magnifications and zoom in on some targets the best part about these style telescopes is you get that big aperture that big light collecting power while still having a small physical structured size it makes it easy to move around it makes it easy to maneuver and it makes it easy to transport so if you are going to those dark sky places you're not lugging this huge telescope around if you want to get into visual astronomy this is the telescope I would recommend you start out with some of you may not care about the compact size of the tabletop Scopes and maybe you live in a place that doesn't have light pollution so you can already get those views you don't need to travel so you want a big telescope that you might want to wheel in and out of your garage if that's the case then let's talk about the next category which is Big telescopes if going big is the name of the game for you I'd recommend going with this 1 M telescope from plane wave instruments it's only going to cost you $600,000 Dam I'm just kidding you don't need that telescope those tabletop telescopes I was recommending have a mirror size of 130 mm which is about 5 in and we call that the aperture of the telescope but maybe you want to go bigger and if you do want to go bigger then I'd recommend these skywatcher dobsonians that can go up to 12 in more than double the size of the tabletop telescopes I was recommending and you may think oh my God in you just keep talking about skywatcher non-stop it's cuz they make really good products and you know you don't have to get skywatcher there are other manufacturers who make these telescopes as well like apertura or Orion but whatever the case is you want to get the dobsonian style telescope because you can get it really big for a low cost low cost is a relative term of course but if you want a 12in refracting telescope the ones that use lenses you're probably going to be spending on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars to get one built one thing to note about the dobsonian telescopes is because it uses mirrors the mirrors can sometimes become misalign which degrade the sharpness of the Target or object you're looking at you can realign the mirrors in a process called colation it's a simple process but it's definitely something to be aware of now maybe looking through it isn't your biggest priority maybe you're more into the aesthetic of telescopes maybe you want your telescope to make your room look good and let's be honest you don't care about how it performs I always recommend these shiny brass looking telescopes they have a certain like dark Academia aesthetic to them which a lot of people find really pleasing and you can find them with a range of prices from like cheap ones that are around 100 bucks up to thousands of dollars for really nice handcrafted ones so it's really up to you what you would want before we finish this I want to quickly talk about astrophotography astrophotography is taking photos of space and you see a lot of them it's something that I do where we take photos of nebulas galaxies star clusters all different types of things with the telescopes I've recommended you can actually use your phone to take photos of the Moon you just bring your phone up to the eyepiece and snap a photo it takes a little getting used to to line up the camera lens with the eyepiece but once you get it you can start taking really cool photos of the Moon the smart telescopes already have the built-in camera so that's a great starting place for astrophotography too if you're looking at at getting into astrophotography I'd recommend not looking at telescopes yet start out with a camera first and once you have that then you can upgrade to something like a star tracker but if you really want to get into it I'd recommend checking out some of the videos I've done on how to do astrophotography and I'll link them in the description below if you want to check it out one final word before we close out this video when it comes to buying the telescope Amazon might seem like the best place to do it but I would recommend against buying from Amazon and trust me I buy stuff from Amazon all the time but when it comes to astronomy equipment you should use a reputable astronomy retailer because they're going to give you a level of service that Amazon could never do for you and they can help you out if you have any questions if you have any issues they are very very knowledgeable so make sure when you're looking to buy these you're going through these astronomy retailers whichever one is local to you if you have any additional questions just throw them down in the comments below I'm happy to help thanks so much for watching clear skies have a good one see you

Channel: Ian Lauer Astro

Views: 46,718

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Id: 6TIOSPMZkL0

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024