Many people buy a telescope for stargazing without realizing how very frustrating star gazing with a telescope can actually be.  It’s for this reason that many who search for a good telescope for home use end up not with a telescope, but with binoculars instead.  When we see hi-tech pictures from outer space, they come from a telescope, right?  Perhaps they come from the Hubble Telescope—so of course, as consumers, it seems best to use the tools that the best of the best are using.  However, telescopes such as the Hubble are incredibly hi-tech and incredibly expensive.  The telescopes that are normally purchased for home use can do nothing even remotely similar to what the Hubble can do; of course, it’s for this reason that so much money was put into the development and use of the Hubble.

What frequently happens when consumers buy a telescope or when someone receives one as a gift is that the telescope is used once or twice and then thrown in the garage, back in the corner, where it will be out of the way.  The reason for this is that usually nothing can really be seen with a telescope; a telescope is not really the best way to see the stars and planets, at least not a telescope like the ones regular consumers can buy.  If you don’t have a very considerable amount of money to spend on a planetarium-grade telescope, don’t waste $100 on one of the home-use ones—invest in a good pair of binoculars instead.

Why?  Well, the reasons are simple.  The problem with standard consumer telescopes is that they magnify what is being seen too much.  Never thought that could be a problem?  What happens is the images are big and blurry, when, of course, everyone would prefer a sharp, small but discernible image.  It’s always better to be able to see something clearly than it is to be able to see it bigger, but completely blurred.  Take digital photographs for example.  If you zoom in on a digital photograph to a very large extent, you can no longer make out the contents of the picture.  You can see some colors, but everything is blurred together; you can’t actually see that there are two people eating ice cream in the photo.  A standard telescope’s effect of Jupiter is the same.  Instead of seeing a small, clear view of Jupiter, you will see a blotch that is actually unrecognizable as Jupiter unless you know exactly where to look for Jupiter.

Another common reason for frustration among consumers who’ve bought standard telescopes is that they invert all of the images.  Of course, for the trained astronomer, this would not be a problem, but usually someone who’s bought a telescope for the first time is just getting their feet wet when it comes to star-gazing.  For these people, maybe you among them, the inverted image the telescope gives makes it virtually impossible to locate the things you see in your star gazing book in the telescope’s image.

For these two big reasons, a pair of binoculars can be an even better choice than a small telescope.  Binoculars do not magnify so deeply that they blur everything in their sights; they also do not invert the image that is in front of them.  For this reason, a pair of binoculars is a much better choice, at least to begin with.  If after getting your feet wet you want more and more experience with star watching, you should invest in a high-quality telescope that does not magnify things so much that you couldn’t see them.

 

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