Can you recommend a good beginner telescope by brand or type for less than $200?

Whatever you do, don't buy one of those cheap refractor telescopes that you often see at Walmart or department stores (the kind you look through from one end to the other). You'll regret it and never use it. A good refractor costs well over $200, even for a small one.





The best telescope you can buy for the money is a reflector, which has a mirror at the bottom and you look through an eyepiece near the top. It's great for deep space viewing, but acceptable for closer objects too, and gives you excellent quality for the price.





Celestron is a good budget brand for telescopes while still having decent quality. Meade is also a good consideration, though sometimes more expensive.





I like to buy from Adorama, a reputable online store in New York. Here are a couple of links you might consider.


Meade:


http://www.adorama.com/MD114EQASTR.html


http://www.adorama.com/MD114EQA.html





Celestron:


(This one is an ';entry level'; model, also a smaller one for $120.)


http://www.adorama.com/CNF114EQ.html





(You can pay a bit more and go up in optics quality which makes it easier to see sharp detail)


http://www.adorama.com/CNF76EQ.html





A couple of tips:


- It's better to buy a quality small telescope instead of a cheap large one.


- Don't worry about magnification. Magnification is just the eyepiece that you can switch out, not the actual telescope. What you want is lens/mirror size which is the amount of light the telescope can collect.Can you recommend a good beginner telescope by brand or type for less than $200?
no, any decent telescope, for beginner especially, (because they need to learn their way around not only the cosmos, but a telescope), is going to cost several hundred dollars more than $200.Can you recommend a good beginner telescope by brand or type for less than $200?
Best place to look.





http://www.telescope.com/jump.jsp?itemID鈥?/a>
I don't consider any telescope that is less than $200 brand new to be good, but I'll try to help you choose the least bad bad one.





I suppose..if you must buy it new, I'd go for the Celestron FirstScope 114 EQ Short Tube reflector.


or


The Orion StarBlast 4.5'; EQ reflector.


or maybe


The Konus Electronic 500





I have confidence in the optics of the Celestron and Orion. Konus is a Russian brand that isn't very common here but it is known in astronomy circles and I don't hear bad things about it.


The appealing thing about the Konus is it comes with a motor drive and at the very least you should be able to get some fairly decent ';short'; long term exposure photos provided you don't use too high of a magnification.





The deal with all of these telescopes is they make them cheap by cutting corners on the mounts and a sturdy mount is integral to observing, especially if you are using high magnification...which you typically only use to see a lot of planetary detail, and is always a challange even in good telescopes.. The upside is, all of these telescopes are 4.5'; in aperture and you can't use super high magnification with them anyway. It's not that you can't try, you just won't get a good image.
I agree with what others have said about getting a reflector type telescope with a good mount. My first telescope was one of those high power refractors without a precise adjustment mount and about all it was good for was looking at the moon.