Choosing your first budget telescope

Indian households and telescopes are poles apart, reason being the budget constraints. But not anymore.!

This article is here to guide every amatuer astronomy enthusiast out there to get his first budget telescope without compromising in terms of quality.

Budget range: 5,000-15,000 INR.

There are excellent telescopes to choose in the above budget range. If you end up buying any cheap telescope in toy store that costs less than 5000 rupees, you'll experience nothing but disappointment. So save up the money and buy a good telescope from a reputed brand. There are so many brands to choose from. The below mentioned are the most popular and best interms of quality..

1) Orion

2) Celestron

3) Meade instruments

4) Dr. Maddy telescopes

5) Explore scientific 

6) i-optron

7)Sky watcher

8)Star tracker India.

Even out of these seven brands,Orion and star tracker produces the best budget telescopes for a beginner. Other brands do have some telescopes in the budget range of 5k-15k,but they're limited in terms of performance and usually not available in India.

Orion does it the best.

The main reason I'm stressing on Orion is because their beginner telescopes are mounted on a table top Dobsonian mount instead of a tripod. If you're an absolute beginner,tripod can be a major discomfort and also increases the cost of the telescope. If you have a windy situation or if you don't set up the tripod properly or God forbid the tripod itself is of cheap quality and not sturdy enough,the image through the telescope eyepiece will wobble a lot. Some telescopes also come on equatorial mounts with heavy counter weights. It becomes very difficult to do weight balancing and carrying the telescope with all those counter weights in place. They easily add 6-7 kgs of weight to the whole telescope array. I own a telescope on a tripod with equatorial mount. It took me 2 weeks to adjust the tripod legs, balance counter weights properly,polar align the scope(since it is an equatorial mount). It was a tedious process. So don't go for a telescope with tripod if you're an absolute beginner. Go for a table top dobosonian mount because it's compact, telescope won't be heavy so that you can carry it anywhere in car or bus and it won't wobble much while viewing.Just point the scope at an object you're looking by left-right and top-bottom adjustments. As simple as that..

The second reason is that most telescope brands don't have reflector telescopes at cheap prices except Orion. They usually have refractor telescopes. There are three problems with refractor telescopes.

1) Chromatic abberations.(false colours due to lens defects)

2)They come on a tripod.

3) They're very costly to manufacture. 

The third point plays a very crucial role here. To buy a 100mm refractor telescope,you have to spend 35,000+ rupees,whereas you will get 100mm reflector telescope at 10k-15k only. Till 70mm aperture,you won't find much difference in price though.Refractor telescopes have high image contrast,focal length,no need to collimate the optics,easy to clean. But reflector telescopes are equally good if not better in terms of cost benefit ratio and user experience.

So there you have it. Choose a table top dobosonian reflector telescope (if you find difficulty with tripods) or else 70mm refractor (if your preference is to get a good quality image) as your first scope. Below are some telescopes I would recommend.

1) Meade eclipse view 82mm reflecting telescope.(5800 rupees)

One of its kind. Meade instruments are known for producing premium quality advanced telescopes such as aphochromatic refractors and go-to telescopes with astrophotography cameras. But this beginner telescope from their company is really good. It has a solar filter.! No other budget telescope  that I know gives you a solar filter and two lenses with 82mm aperture..

Cheap and best telescope you can get. Period.

2)Orion 70mm travelscope.(7000 rupees)

This scope gets a place in this article despite having a tripod because of its compactness and travel friendly nature. They'll give you a nice backpack into which you can fit telescope,tripod and travel outside the city where you get clear skies and start observing. Another very good feature of this telescope is that it can also be used for terrestrial viewing. That means if you're on a trip to beach/mountains and scenic places or if you're a bird watcher,you can always carry it and get stunning close up views of distant objects. I am planning to get this scope once I get a bike. But I should tell you that this telescope has some serious abberation issues due to which there are false colours. Also tripod may be little shaky. Nevertheless,you can do terrestrial viewing and lunar observation with great interest.

4)Star tracker 70mm refractor telescope.(8500 rupees)

A 70mm refractor telescope with 700mm focal length,3 eyepieces,one 3X Barlow with lens cleaning fluid and moon map! Refractors are costly to manufacture and even if you get 70mm refractor in Orion at this price,focal length is short and you get only one eyepiece with it. Compared to the Orion telescope,this one is way better with 3 Kellner quality eyepieces and a Barlow lens too. Even though it has tripod,I believe it won't be much of a problem to carry it because it is light weight (3.5kgs of total weight (telescope+tripod). One of my friends bought this recently. Will update here how her experience was,in detail. You can get this at tejraj telescopes.

3)Orion 100mm tabletop dobosonian reflector (10,000 rupees)

I had to look at twice to confirm that they're giving 100mm reflector telescope for just 10k. Many serious astronomers back in the history have used only 70-80mm refractors to catalogue the messier objects,galaxies,nebulae and star clusters. Imagine how many deep sky objects you can spot with this scope with 100mm aperture. Also,it has a parabolic mirror! Most reflector telescopes at this price give only spherical mirror but Orion is giving a parabolic mirror,which is astonishing. I sometimes wonder if they're making any profit at all by selling this telescope. Nevertheless,it is for our benefit only. It comes with two eyepieces,finderscope,moon map and a software which shows all the objects visible to you based on your location. Limiting stellar magnitude for this scope is 12.9 that means you'll see hundreds of stars that your naked eye cannot see. Since it's a parabolic mirror,the objects are seen crisp throughout the field of view. I have a telescope with spherical mirror because of this there's colour abberation at the edge.

4)Kson 102mm(650mm focal length)

Not so popular in India as Celestron,Orion but Kson is a very good company and offers quality optical instruments at affordable prices. This particular table top dobosonian is 102mm reflector with parabolic mirror and slightly better than Orion 100mm tabletop,which has only 400mm focal length. This telescope has focal length of 650mm and also comes with 3X Barlow and two Kellner eyepieces. Price is around 12000 rupees. It's a steal if you ask me. This is available only in one shop,i.e India binocular shop. You can find their website online. They also has an YouTube channel where they made a video on assembly of this very telescope and many more. 

Special mention:Orion starblast 4.5II(15,000 rupees). 

114mm aperture on an equatorial mount. If you're willing to learn how to use equatorial mount and don't mind a tripod,go for this. Otherwise avoid. Same telescope comes on a dobosonian mount as well,but it costs 18,000 rupees. But 15000 is already a quite a lot of money for your first scope.]

There's absolutely no rule you should choose only the above telescopes I mentioned,but the point of this article is to encourage more middle class households to get their hands onto something marvellous and appreciate the cosmos without burning hole in their pocket. Even if you can afford more,try these scopes first and you can always get a new advanced telescope such as go-to telescope, 12-inch dobosonian, aphochromatic refractors etc later on. My first viewing experience was through one of the table top dobosonian reflector in a science fair. If I remember correctly,it was Celestron first scope. I have seen moon in its full glory and went back to the owner three days straight, requesting him to let me see Jupiter,Saturn through it. Only after getting satisfactory result,I decided to buy an advanced telescope sometime later. Fast forward 3 years,I now own a Celestron Astromaster 130 with German equatorial mount. It costs 23000+ and I am very much satisfied with it. I could see deep sky objects such as North America nebula, Pleiades star cluster, Andromeda galaxy, Orion nebula, etc and also planets such as mars,Jupiter, Saturn,Venus. And of course the moon every alternate day when sky is reasonably good. Believe me, Astronomy is an adrenaline rush experience that cannot be described in words.Think about getting a scope if you haven't till now.Thanks for reading. Have a good day.

Clear skies.!

(Link for the shop who sells the above telescopes:

https://goscientifics.com/

Also try: 

Fotokart telescopes,Delhi.

C-sky scientifics, Maharashtra.

Thirdidigital.com, Hyderabad.

https://tejraj.com/)

Note: PLEASE DON'T BUY FROM AMAZON/FLIPKART etc as they're not dedicated sellers for optics of any sort.