Best Beginner Astronomy Gear: Your First Telescope Setup

After helping dozens of beginners, my recommendation is simple: get a Dobsonian reflector.

Dobsonians offer maximum aperture for your money. Aperture is the only spec that truly matters—it determines how much light you collect and how much detail you can see.

They're intuitive to use. Point and look. No complicated alignments, no counterweights, no laptop required.

They're reliable. No motors to fail, no batteries to die. A Dobsonian from 30 years ago still works perfectly.

Your telescope will come with at least one eyepiece, but here's what you should add:

A Telrad or red-dot finder makes finding objects infinitely easier than the tiny finderscopes included with most beginner scopes.

A Moon filter dims the painfully bright lunar surface to comfortable levels and reveals more crater detail.

Turn Left at Orion (book) tells you exactly what to look at each month and how to find it. The essential companion to any telescope.

I won't lie to you: what you see through a telescope is not what you see in Hubble photos.

Deep sky objects appear as gray smudges. Nebulae rarely show color. Galaxies are faint fuzzy patches.

But there's magic in seeing photons that left a galaxy 2 million years ago land on your retina. You're seeing real light from real objects. That's something a photo can never replicate.