Starting out right can lead you to the myriad pleasures that come from seeing with your own eyes once-in-a-lifetime sights that have traveled from the far corners of the Universe.

Starting out wrong can lead to frustration, disappointment, and wasted money. Starting out wrong, for example, means buying the biggest and most expensive telescope on the block before you know what you want to see, or how to find it, or whether you can even see it at all. Starting out wrong means expecting the Universe to give up its secrets easily, or expecting to see more through your telescope than our turbulent atmosphere and the laws of optics will allow.

Luckily, starting out right in astronomy is not all that difficult. Here are a few tips to help you start your journey to the stars on the right foot.

Start by using your bare eyes and a basic star chart like those published monthly in Astronomy and Sky & Telescope magazines to become familiar with the sky. That familiarity will pay dividends. A customer of ours once complained that his telescope wouldn’t track the stars properly. It took a while for us to realize that he was trying to polar align the telescope on the star Maia in the Pleiades, rather than on Polaris in the Little Dipper. It’s very hard for a telescope to properly track objects in the sky when it’s polar aligned on a star that’s 65 degrees away from the actual celestial pole at which it should be aimed. True, the Pleiades do look like a very little dipper, but a star chart and a little familiarity with the night sky before buying a telescope would have saved that new stargazer a lot of frustration. It can do the same for you.

Next, move up to binoculars. You don’t have to spend big bucks on giant astronomical binoculars to get started. Even those inexpensive old binos collecting dust in your closet can start you stargazing. That old pair of 7 x 35mm binoculars you take to football games, or those 8 x 42mm binos you use for birdwatching, will have a wide field of view that will make it easy for you to star-hop around the sky to find many deep space gems – Andromeda, the Pleiades, the Great Nebula in Orion, the Double Cluster in Perseus, and many more. And don’t forget the Moon. There’s a surprising amount of lunar detail to be seen with a steady pair of binoculars. Learn how to find your way around the sky with them and a pair of binoculars can keep you stargazing for a lifetime.

Get a good set of star charts – like the Tirion Atlas 2000.0 – and a guidebook or two. Using a more detailed star chart than the simple monthly charts in the magazines will let you locate hundreds of deep space objects with your binoculars (and eventually your telescope). Guidebooks – like Star Hopping, Deep Sky Companions: The Messier Objects, Nightwatch, or The Universe from Your Backyard – will describe those objects for you, help you find them, and give you a feel for what they look like through eyeball, binocular, or telescope. Becoming a regular reader of the monthly sky guides in Astronomy or Sky & Telescope will keep you alert to the transient sights that are visible in binoculars – things like comets, the day to day changing positions of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, the phases of Venus, the brightening and dimming of variable stars, and more. The skills you develop navigating the sky with binoculars, using star charts and guidebooks, will stand you in good stead when you move up to a telescope.

Seek out other astronomers. Solitary stargazing can be restful and fulfilling, but observing with others will open your eyes to many more starry wonders and increase your observing skills. Join an astronomy club, even if you don’t yet own a telescope. Many clubs have telescopes for their scope-less club members to borrow. Attend the club’s monthly star parties and look through as many different telescopes there as you can, to get a feel for what telescope types best suit your needs and your budget.

When you’re ready for a telescope, use the information in this web site to help you choose the scope that’s right for you. When you do get your scope, read the instruction manual before you start assembling it (you can download many of them in advance from astronomics.com). The manual usually will answer many of the questions that are bound to come up. If it doesn’t, give us a call. Don’t go overboard buying accessories at first. The greater the number of new gadgets that you have to learn how to use all at once, the more easily you can get frustrated. Take astronomy one step at a time.

Finally, once you have your scope, keep in mind that you have to meet the Universe on its terms, not yours. There is nothing you can do about clouds blocking your view, or missing the timing of a long-anticipated event, or the extreme distance and faintness of an object you want to see. Patience and persistence are as much a part of an astronomer’s observing kit as a set of eyepieces.