Do You Really Need a Telescope?

Few experiences with the night sky are more instantly rewarding than your first look at the moon, a nebula, or a planet through a telescope. Saturn, in particular, can look almost too perfect. One of us taught students (while in graduate school) who refused to believe that the planet that they were looking at through the telescope was real. This student insisted that Saturn was a sticker on the telescope lens. However, it is also true that such an experience can be singularly disappointing if that shiny new telescope you bought at the mall turns out to be a piece of wobbly, hard-to-use junk. If you are willing to invest in a good telescope (we’ll talk about the magnitude of the investment in just a moment), and if you are willing to invest the time to learn how to use it, a telescope can be a wonderful thing to have.
But will you use it?
If you are an urban dweller who never escapes the streetlights of the city and are hemmed in by tall buildings, you may be better advised to spend your money elsewhere. Then again, owning a sufficiently portable telescope gives you a good excuse to pack up every once in a while and head for the country, where the skies are darker and the seeing is better.
faint to see with the naked eye visible, all stars are so incredibly far away (the closest beyond our sun, Alpha Centauri, is about four light-years away) that a given star at higher magnification will still be nothing more than a point of light. Magnification is also largely wasted if what you look at is too dim to see well. Get binoculars with the largest aperture (the diameter of the objective, or main lens) you can afford. An aperture of 50 millimeters is a good choice. Couple this with a 7magnification, and you have a 7 50 pair of binoculars—a good allaround choice for handheld viewing.
If you want to successfully use binoculars with a magnification of more than 10or 12, you will need to mount them on a camera tripod equipped with a binocular adaptor clamp or a specially designed binocular tripod; otherwise, the sky will be a blur.
Binoculars have the advantage of being very portable, and whole guidebooks have been written about observing the sky with them (for example, Exploring the Night Sky with Binoculars, by Patrick Moore [3rd ed., Cambridge University Press, 1996]). However, at anywhere from $200 to $1,000 and more, binoculars with high quality optics are not cheap; if you’re thinking about buying a pair of big, expensive binoculars, there are other possibilities you may want to consider.