Hi everyone,
I’ve been an avid user of stellarium and other sky watching apps for a few years, getting events through and looking at them at best through an old pair of binoculars. I got to thinking last night waiting to spot some of the Draconids, I should really just get a telescope. Queue being up till midnight watching all the usual suspects on YouTube trying to understand what I would need.
I gathered Sky-Watcher Startravel 80 OTA Celestron AstroMaster 70AZ/Sky-Watcher Mercury-707 AZ Or a Dobsonian would be great entry points at the sub £200 level. Is there anything I should be looking out for, maybe some good search terms for eBay. I’m mainly looking to use it for looking at events like lunar eclipse or convergences as well as the planets and the moon
If you wanna just dip your toes in, get a Celestron, and some aftermarket lenses. I’ll have to wait until I’m home to get the specifics for you, but I spent about $30 on the telescope, and maybe about the same on a couple of lenses, and can see Jupiter from my back porch (I live in the country and don’t have to worry about light pollution, jsyk)
If you can’t wait until I get home, do a search for something like “4 inch Celestron, 2x Barlow lens”
I just went and googled, it was a Celestron Firstscope, which is now around 70USD on Amazon
I had a used 8" gso dobsonian and loved how great value it was. Of course it has its disadvantages being so bulky, and not doing any tracking, but for a short periods of backyard use it was fine.
