There are several telescopes available in department stores, on Amazon, and on eBay for under $100. Just keep in mind that telescope prices are not constant.
Due to the question, we kind of have to use the actual dollar amounts, or something close to them, to answer the question.
(Let’s hope I don’t regret those words.) In most of our articles, we remain somewhat agnostic on the specific dollar amounts and prefer to speak about the relative prices of telescopes within a price range. It’s unclear at this point if they will be going down any time soon or ever, but it seems like they’re not actively increasing at the moment. How much does a telescope cost?Īs of this writing, telescope prices are in flux and generally rising due to a combination of factors resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Virtually the only telescopes that big are Newtonians and SCTs. This includes either extremely expensive refractors, mid-priced Schmidt-Cassegrains and Maksutovs, or very affordable Newtonians.įor a forever telescope, you’re going to want something in the 8” to 12” range. In fact, if you aren’t an astronomy fanatic, some of these may be the only telescopes you’ll ever need.įor a genuinely good telescope, which even an astronomy fanatic will take a while to tire of, telescopes in the 5”-6” category (or maybe an 8” for someone with aperture fever) fit the bill. There are many high-quality instruments, even in the affordable beginner price range, within this set of apertures.
Looking for a good telescope upgrade#
Are you looking for a beginner telescope to get a passing familiarity with the night sky with the assumption that you’re soon going to upgrade to bigger and better things? Or are you looking for a “forever telescope,” a telescope that, though it may make certain compromises, you will be reasonably happy with for a long time? Or perhaps something in between, where you might want to upgrade one day but you still expect it to be a serious instrument?Įach of these corresponds, essentially, to a set of apertures.įor a good beginner telescope you may eventually grow out of (or want to supplement, at least), that would fall within the 3” to 4.5” range of apertures. Ease of use and portability are important, and cost of telescope is an issue as well.Ī good telescope could mean different things to different people. Now, in practice, other things must be taken into consideration, like secondary obstruction and optical flaws like chromatic aberration and spherical aberration, which plague cheaper telescopes, but otherwise, if you have two nearly identical telescopes and one’s bigger, you want the bigger one.īut aperture isn’t everything. The result is that a larger telescope will show smaller dots when looking at a point source of light, so the telescope has more “pixels,” if you will, to assemble the image out of.Īll else being equal, the best telescope is the one with the largest aperture to let in the most light. The larger the opening, the more light gets through without rippling. Because light is just as much a wave as it is a particle, it ripples around the edge of the objective. The secondary function of a telescope is to increase the resolution of a target, so when you do magnify it, you’ll see it at a higher detail. The more light you gather, the brighter the image will be. See, the primary purpose of a telescope is not to magnify. Aperture is the size of the light-gathering element of the telescope, called the objective. If you take a look at the rating scheme we use for telescope reviews on this website, you’ll see that there are several important aspects of a telescope, but what our rating scheme lacks (intentionally) is perhaps the most important spec of the telescope: aperture. You didn’t think this was going to be an easy straight answer with a question as vague as that, right? There are two questions here.
A lot of people think a big telescope will cost no less than a thousand dollars, and while it is very easy to spend about that much or more if you have that budget, there are certainly beginner-friendly, budget-friendly options available. Telescopes, as it turns out, are pretty affordable actually. “Three hundred dollars,” I calmly corrected. “Three hundred thousand!?” They exclaimed. An Apertura DT6 telescope, and a toy Celestron FirstScope, set up to do sidewalk astronomy in the parking lot of a popular gas station convenience store.
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