STARTING IN ASTRONOMY

Focus On
November 25, 2025
Articles, Community

Part 2
Last month I mentioned that an ordinary pair of binoculars and a garden chair are all you need to begin looking at the heavens when starting in astronomy. My main reason for saying this is the number of telescopes that go unused in homes across the world, whereas a pair of binoculars is always useful for anyone in the home.
Why do most telescopes go unused? There are several reasons for this, firstly most of the telescopes (not all) in the beginners price range are poor things giving poor results. Secondly, a decent telescope is difficult to understand for a beginner, the stand and how it’s attached to the telescope tube are all important. The stand itself, usually a tripod has to be bulky and strong to keep vibration to a minimum, this means a good one is heavy. Secondly the head, the proper name for the gubbins that fastens the ‘scope to the tripod, a simple one works fine, but it isn’t easy to understand for a beginner. I’ve lost count of how often I’ve explained why all the angles of the two main axis on an equatorial mount are critical to guiding a ‘scope properly, often to blank faces.
If any of that doesn’t make sense to you, that’s because a telescope isn’t a simple thing to use, you have to learn about what things are and how to use them and no-one else can do that for you, most people don’t.
Of course in today’s world we have clever electronics to do most of this for us, most often on compact designs of telescope. These work very well, but they cost more than many people are willing to pay when starting off. Size really does matter when beginners look at telescopes, a big one must be better…… right?
No, often that isn’t the case, a big object lens, the main lens is a very good thing but a bulky telescope on a wobbly stand is a horrible thing to use and these are precisely what most under 200€ telescopes are.
All this is why I recommend binoculars to most beginners who are starting in astronomy, they are easy to understand and use yet open up a vast amount of the sky for real observation.
The last point worth a mention is expectation, what does a user expect to see through a telescope? Are you hoping to see a planet or galaxy like in the many pictures on the web? You never will, a photograph is actually many, many pictures layered together, taken with very clever astro cameras taken over many, many hours of viewing and stitched together on a computer, no human eye can do this.
Nearly done now regarding starting in astronomy part 2, so you’ve used binoculars for a while, learnt the main bits of the night sky, and fancy moving on to a ‘scope, the problem is that the ones you fancy start at a thousand euros and you just don’t know if it’s worth it. Join a club, this is because clubs often get approached with second hand telescopes, occasionally free of charge and sometimes these are decent ones that are well worth having. Naturally there are some of the nasty ones I described earlier but most clubs filter these out and don’t pass them on.