What To Except From New Telescopes

Most of the amateur astronomers, when they buy a telescope they would expect to see planets and galaxies just the way they look like in internet. But the pictures in internet are taken by very big and powerful telescopes like the Hubble space telescope. The first telescope I bought is a 60mm refractor.
The first planet I saw was Jupiter. When I focused it, I was very disappointed.  What I saw was just a brownish orangish dot. The dealer from whom I bought the scope told me that I would be able to see Jupiter’s moons clearly. The guy told me the scopes max magnification is 525x. But for that I need to use the 4mm eyepiece and barlow 3x lens. The image was so dim I couldn’t  see a thing. One can see planets like Jupiter and Saturn as small disks based on the telescope they use.

The first and most important to thing to consider in telescope’s specs is the aperture. It’s like the old saying “bigger the better”. Forget about magnification, high aperture is better than high magnification.

A good 80mm scope would be ideal for amateur with low budget.

Accessories: These are the accessories one would get with their telescope usually

Finder scope: Finder scopes are very useful devices that generally come along with the telescope set. They are used to locate any object in the sky. They are of low power and you will probably spend more time looking through the finder scope. Once you locate the desired object in the sky with finder scope, you should look through the mainscope and adjust the focus.

A good Finder scope should:

be aligned properly before usage

be of 5x or more power

be mounted properly with the screws tightly fit.

Star diagonal: the refractor scope produces inverted image which is fine for astronomical observing. Using star diagonal will help you the correct the image orientation for land (terrestrial) viewing. Though it corrects vertical inversion it will create mirror image (lateral inversion).

Barlow lens: This will help your increase the magnification as many times as indicated on it. As in a 2x barlow would increase the scope’s magnification by 2 times. Barlow lens dims the image formed.