Best Telescope for Christmas 2024
Your first telescope has to be able to capture the nerdmaking moment when you see Jupiter or Saturn floating in a vast sea of blackness and you realise for the first time that we on earth are floating in the vast sea of blackness too. That’s what did it for me, and these telescope picks will do the same for you.
Best for Kids – £99 deal
This scope isn’t just for kids, its basically the best value compact lunar and planetary scope there is. One big reason is the mini dobsonian mount which is the simplest and smoothest of all the cheap mounts. Up until now manufacturers have placed not very good mini Newtonian telescopes on these mounts however this Maksutov telescope design is much better thanks to its longer focal length which is contained within a very compact form thanks to the clever way it folds the light up and down the tube. This little firecracker is far better than the plastic ‘cheap’ scopes that compete with it in this price range on amazon.
Amazon: Best for kids 60mm Mak with mini Dob Mount
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Best for Planets £400-£600
I got turned into a nerd when I saw Jupiter through my 90mm Skywatcher Maksutov on a little computerised Virtuoso goto mount. There is a bit of learning to do to get the most out of the computerised mount but nothing that 30minutes of googling or watching youtube videos on boxing day can’t resolve… and its well worth it. These little scopes pack a punch. In fact I’m recommending slightly larger scopes than I started out with which will give you crisper more magnified views. These are serious astronomical instruments that will work beautifully on the planets and the moon and with wide angle eyepieces you can see the brightest nebula … although for deep space viewing you really need something else (see below). You can of course get bigger versions of these telescopes which will when the atmosphere is calm offer you better views of our planets but in all honesty a larger aperture doesn’t make much difference when the seeing is poor.
Amazon USA: Nexstar 4se
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If you live in the USA then your lucky because the Celestron range of Maksutov and SCT telescopes are cheaper on your side of the pond and that makes them a better deal. There is no difference in quality between the brands.
If the Maks/SCT telescopes above are too expensive for your budget then you can get nearly the same optical quality for less money with a long refractor. See this page for more details but bear in mind you have to sacrifice the electronic mount which counteracts the rotation of the earth.
Best for Nebula and Galaxies £400-£600
This year the new generation of smart telescopes has finally delivered on its promise. Rather than you pointing your telescope and using your eyes to see very faint deep space objects these telescopes use a robotic mount to automatically point the telescope and a camera capture the photons. You can see deep space objects begin to resolve on your phone or tablet or laptop without going through the pain of learning how to do astrophotography.
Now our eyes are very wonderful but they can only gather photons for 1/30th of a second before those photons are lost so that new photons can be gathered. And that means you need a really huge telescope to be able to gather enough photons per second to actually be able to see the faint nebula and galaxies. These smart telescopes overcome that obstacle by employing sensitive cameras. I used the same idea on a much bigger scale with my video: Journey to the Edge of the Universe
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Black Friday Price Drop
Cameras have the huge advantage of being able to gather photons for much longer. And you can see the deep space object your pointing at resolve in greater and greater detail in as the camera starts adding the photons together in a process known as live stacking.
A few years ago I took on a robotic telescope and won, now I’m not sure I could – not at this price anyway. These smart telescopes really have come of age. So does this mean the end of nerds like me. Am I to be replaced. I personally don’t think so. Tere is still room to do some proper nerding out with this gear. Rather than accepting the automatically stacked image the robot delivers to your phone you can achieve much better results by personally processing the individual images the robotic telescope has gathered in dedicated astro software… and that is half the battle of being a nerd anyway.
Best for looking at Nebula and Galaxies and Planets with your eyes £800
Choosing the best scope for visual observing of faint galaxies and nebula is pretty straightforward. To put it simply you want a fat scope, the fattest you can move around without inducing a hernia. A fat scope will catch lots of photons and therefore brighten the very dim deep space objects. Also a fat aperture will reduce the telescope’s diffraction rings allowing you to see more detail and tighter stars. Of course big telescopes and big mounts are expensive so to keep the costs down you will want to use the least expensive telescope design which is the Newtonian and you’ll want a revolutionary cheap mount… happily Californian monk John Dobson perfected an inexpensive mount for big Newtonian telescopes in the 1960’s. He allowed any manufacturer to use his brilliant “Dobsonian” design for free. After leaving the monastery devoted his life to showing the public the wonders of the universe through his big dobs. (here’s a video about him).
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