Expert: Tom Whiting - 1/14/2005

Question
Hello,
I would like to try a little amateur astronomy in my holidays. I want to get a  cheap telescope for my place in Italy(Britain is apparently useless due to excessive light pollution etc.). Anyway, the telescope should ideally be able to automatically "memorise" different parts of the sky - I've seen adverts for telescopes which automatically can point to Sirius or Saturn, say. The trouble is, I don't want to pay £100s of pounds for a telescope only to find it breaking down as soon as I buy it. Which brand would be  the most reliable?
Thanks for your time
Geoff Purcell

Answer
Hi Geoff,
Amateur astronomy is not just a weekend event like a
skiing trip to the Alps, or a visit to Pisa to see the Leaning
Tower, or to Florence to see Galileo's birthplace....it doesn't work that way.
For one thing, there is no such thing as a cheap, GOOD telescope....the reason they are cheap is because they don't
work.  Laws of optics dictate that mirrors and lenses be
ground and figured to better than 1/4 wavelength of light,
which is about 20 millionth's of an inch, so we have to
grind and figure the glass to better than 5 millionth's of an inch from perfection, if you want a respectable image, and that is what you are paying for with a good telescope, which.....I don't know about Italy, but in the
States you are looking at a minimum of 4-5 hundred dollars
USD.  And this is just the optics!  Now if you want the
"goto" feature because you don't know the night sky, and
the drive control that keeps the scope centered on the
desired object, that is an additional 4-5 hundred dollars
USD.  So this is NOT a one-time weekend, ski-trip type of hobby.
 A better plan, instead of buying a cheap scope, would be
to attend an observatory at a college or university, or still
better, find a local club in your town or province....there are
many of them, and join up with those members who go out
observing with their own scopes.  Most amateurs are glad to
have the company out with them at night (for safety reasons), and show off their equipment to new-comers.

In our great hobby, equipment (scopes) come LAST, not
first.  Ours is a knowledge and sight-seeing hobby, so knowledge of the night sky comes first.....you want to
first raid the library and read all you can about it.  Also,
you have to learn (self-teach yourself) the night sky to find
the different objects, so make your first scope a pair of
inexpensive binoculars.  A pair of regular 7 x  35 or 10 x 50
binoculars do a surprisingly good job on the night sky, in
fact, it gets you halfway to a decent 6 or 8 inch reflector
scope worth about $500 USD, for a fraction of that cost.  
Also binoculars are easy to use and carry, the image is
erect (it's typically inverted in a good astronomical scope),
you have a wide 5 degree field of view (scopes typically are
only 1/2 degree), and the image is right in front of your nose
(in a Newtonian Reflector telescope you are looking at right angles to the object being viewed).   You will also need a beginners star chart of the night sky to learn the night sky.
They sell for about $10 in the States.

If you can't point your finger to Saturn, the Andromeda
Galaxy, Comet Macholz, the Beehive Star Cluster, all naked
eye objects, how are you going to point a scope to them
when the scope only sees a 1/2 degree small piece of sky?
You need to learn the night sky first.  You can't find the
Leaning Tower until you first know where Italy is at (constellation), then the city of Pisa (a star), then offset
2 Km to the south to find the leaning tower...we do exactly
the same thing in amateur astronomy, so it's not that
difficult, but you do have to learn and memorize the constellations first....there are only about 40 of them from
the Northern Hemisphere....surely you already know 40
provinces in Italy, so it's learning basically the same thing...
40 area's of the sky.  Constellations are just area's of the
sky now for identification purposes only....no more putting
a man or animal into them.

So in short, amateur astronomy is not just a weekend event....
in fact, if you really get interested, it's a life-long experience
you can enjoy....but you have to go into it correctly, as I've
described above.

I know that isn't what you wanted to hear, but I have to
be honest with you.
Hope all this helps,
Clear Skies,
Tom Whiting
Erie, Pennsylvania
USA