I've always wanted a telescope and was curious. How do you know a good one from a bad one? How do you know how far a telescope will "view"?

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It's all in the quality of the lens/mirror. "Magnification" is less important than people think (unless you are planning on building an observatory). It's about resolution and distortion. The farther away you're trying to see, the more a microscopic (and therefore unseeable to the naked eye) is going to distort and blur stuff.

It's been a long time, and the tech of optics production may have changed this, but "back in the day", if you wanted to see galaxies farther out, you generally went with a "mirror" (short stubby tube, eyepiece on side looking backward) rather than a "lens" (long tube, look forward through tube) -- high quality lenses being a lot more expensive to make than high quality mirrors. On the other hand, if all you want to do is peep at the babe a couple blocks away, then the tube makes more sense since you don't need all that much magnification.

I always thought the Celestrons were cool -- I first saw Saturn's rings through one, I think it had an 6" mirror. But whichever way you go, think "high quality optics" more than "amount of magnification." Magnification means "diameter", but an el cheapo 8" will be less useful than a Zeiss 5." (The 5" zeiss will, alas, almost certainly be the more expensive; I'm not sure there's such a thing as an "inexpensive, yet good" telescope, which is why I don't have one).

I forget exactly what units measure distortion.

Oh, one other thing. Unless this is a babe-watching telescope, get something that is easily transported. (Another reason "short/stubby" works better IMO). Stargazing has to be done from a place where there aren't nasty human-made lights interfering with things. (Think "the farther out of town the better".)

Last but not least, if you're seeking the galaxies really far, far away (where you might want optics and more magnification, too), you need something for "spotting" (think small magnif second tube, either on side or separate).

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What you do is you point it at your neighbor's apartment across from the pool. If you can see the hot MILF walking around nekkid, you have a good telescope. If it's blurry, the telescope sucks and you need a new one.

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we bought a small starter one from a Nat Geo store in a mall. It wasn't the cheapest one but differently a beginner one. It was the side view to locate then we looked through the real lens to fine tune and view. It was pretty amazing. My son didn't use it much because he wanted the jumbo one that he saw at his aunt and uncle's house. I told him to use this one for a while and then we would move up. It sat in the corner for years. Unless I took it out and used it.

The had 3-4 different lenses so that we could adjust the magnification.

We live on the edge of a town and even here, at times, it was hard to view objects because of the lights. I live in a small town of about 4000.

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