Im looking for a reasonably priced telescope that allows me to view planets and deep space clusters without having the price tag of Hubble... Something that will allow me to see Saturns rings would be a good starting point..... Thanks
It's a tough call to balance optical quality against cost, Matt. You can put a cheap lens on a camera and get away with ok pictures, but on an astronomical telescope cheap glass can totally spoil what you're seeing. But there are two main kinds of astro scope. Refracting and reflecting. Refracting scopes are tubes with lenses at each end like on a camera, their magnifying power is a formula based on the length of the tube and the strength of the eyepiece lens. But, their light gathering ability (for nebulae and deep space clusters) is based on the diameter of the lens at the other end, the objective lens. A half decent refractor starts at about 3" diameter for the objective lens. You buy a hand full of eyepieces of varying power and swap them as required to make the subjects bigger, but there's a point at which the diameter of the objective lens restricts magnification and the subject matter begins to look soft. This is the resolving power of the telescope. Reflecting scopes use mirrors to double the focal length of the scope for the given length of the tube, so tend to be more powerful. The same rules as above apply except that to get the best out of a reflector scope you best need to be starting at about 6" diameter for the objective end. I use a Meade 70 (just under 3") reflector scope with three eyepieces and a x3 converter to triple their magnification if needed. It's a 'goto' telescope. Which has a hand controller that you can program what you want to see and motors point it at it for you. And I have an old Celestron 6" reflector that I have to do all the work myself with but is about on a par with the little Meade. With them I can see the clouds of Jupiter (just) and the rings of Saturn (just). In fairness, unless you're a moon freak, that's about all that's worth looking at in the solar system with these small portable ones. Mars never looks much bigger than Jupiter because it's so dinky. Venus and Mercury show phases like the moon but again are quite tiny. The outer planets are too far out to see them as discs, unless you go for much more serious kit that really needs to be permanently mounted. Most of the readily available scopes can be tricked out with cameras really cheaply to link to a computer and there's some slick image stacking software out there for compiling composite images, which, remember is what Hubble does. The colour in its pictures of deep space objects aren't actually visible to the eye.
Just seen this. It looks a suspiciously good deal for what you get. https://www.telescopehouse.com/tele...y-level/heritage-114p-virtuoso-telescope.html
It might be worth contacting your local astronomical society. Give you a chance to see what other people are using and what you could expect to get for your money. Also plenty of advice available... If nothing else - quality second hand equipment may well be available...
