My 8 year old daughter has been doing a project on space
at school and has developed a keen interest in the stars
and she sat transfixed watching stargazing live
on bbc2 last night .
I’d love to nurture this interest and I think an easy to use
Telescope would be something she would love… so what
should I be looking for ? a quick search on eBay has left
me more baffled ….any stargazers out there?

you might find this useful

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/tv/guides/BBC_Stargazing_Live_2012_Guide_to_buying_a_telescope.pdf

Did you miss the bit where they were recommending telescopes? (-:

According to the show, you’re looking between £80 and £300 for something half decent as a starter. The first question, I guess, is how much you want to spend. I expect that it’s the sort of hobby where a lot of people rapidly lose interest once the novelty’s worn off (and that’s not just an 8-year old).

Maybe your first step should be to take her to a planetarium? Or, Jodrell Bank has a pretty awesome kiddie-friendly visitors’ centre.

I was surprised at the quality of the image of the moon I can get on my DSLR with 300mm lens while videoing on the crop setting live through my TV.

Anyway…carry on….

i’ve got a 3″ newtonian.

it’s enough to see the moons of jupiter, the orion nebula, that sort of thing.

but…

it’s not enough to see any detail on jupiter – it’s just a small white blob, with teeny tiny white blobs next to it.

it’s cheap, and very flexible/wobbly. it’s not very easy to aim/position*. it’s actually quite frustrating to use, unless your daughter is the geekiest 8yr old ever, i can imagine her getting bored quickly.

(*partly because it’s so cheap/simple, partly because of the inherant ‘everything-is-upside-down-and-back-to-front-left-is-right-up-is-down’ mind twisting nature of the newtonian)

imho, the optics in a newtonian are quite simple/cheap. the optics in my cheap telescope are much better than the wobbly stand, and the shonky aiming performance.

i’m off to the kielder observatory in a few weeks!

yeah I did see the recommendations re telescope but was
hoping there might be something kiddie friendly dont want
to spend more than £50

I’ve got an ETX 125 5″ scope with the “got to” stuff. Great scope, they also do a 70 or 90mm versions at a reasonable price…ish

Do you have a semi decent pair of binos? You might be surprised at what you can see with them [Galilean moons of Jupiter, exceptional views of moon etc]

Buy a £10 green laser pointer off ebay so you can point stuff out easier.

I picked up a 4″ (110mm) Russian TAL-1 for £50, so far so good. Regarded as having the best optics for the price range and good focal length (longer gives better magnifying power), heavy as hell though (Typcial Ruskies build quality!).

There’s a couple on the bay quite cheap at the moment which will go quite cheap as they rarely reach £100.

TAL – 1