Thursday, December 1, 2011

How To Buy A Telescope

By Owen Jones


There are numerous different sorts of telescopes, besides numerous different makes, and these different kinds are manufactured to perform different duties. Therefore, before leaping in and purchasing a telescope you have to learn how to buy a telescope first.

However, you can cut out a lot of useless looking and comparing if you can answer two vital questions before you start, namely: what do you require the telescope for and how much can you afford to spend?

In many ways, it is best to start with a quite simple telescope, realize what its failings are for what you would like a telescope for and then trade up into the right sort of telescope. Another decent manner to start is with a pair of binoculars and then purchase a telescope that suits your interests. Binoculars will disclose a great deal more that the naked eye - it is quite surprising how much.

If you would like to use your optical aid for a number of purposes such as bird-watching and astronomy, then binoculars are almost certainly the solution until you opt to specialize in astronomy, at which time you can get a telescope dedicated to that hobby and its tremendous distances.

The eyepiece is the most vital part of a telescope and you will want one with adjustable magnification. The quality of this lens is vital: the view through it ought to be crisp and clear with very little to no chromatic aberration. Chromatic aberration is a form of colour distortion that manifests itself as halos around outstandingly bright lights.

Knowing where you will be utilizing your telescope is also important, because of unfavourable factors in cities. The skies above cities are frequently polluted with contaminants like smoke or smog, but they are always polluted with street light. This street light pollution can be a real annoyance, so ask if your telescope can become fitted with filters to mask out these pollutants.

A telescope has to collect light in order for you to see through it. This is accomplished by the primary lens and the amount of light that the telescope collects is in direct proportion to the size of this primary lens or objective. If you would like more light, you need an objective with a larger surface area.

Light is needed rather than magnification sometimes, especially while searching the stars because of the distances concerned. It really scarcely matters whether you are magnifying a star 10 or 12 times when it is 1,000 light years away. However, what you can see, you want to be able to see clearly.

Too much magnification can make directing the telescope very problematic for novices unless there is a 'sight'. This is a weaker lens outside the main telescope that makes it easier to aim at the object that you would like to look at.

It is not possible to cover all the aspects of buying your first star-gazing telescope in a short article, so be willing to do some more research.




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