Now, in practice, other things must be taken into consideration, like secondary obstruction and optical flaws like chromatic aberration and spherical aberration, which plague cheaper telescopes, but otherwise, if you have two nearly identical telescopes and one’s bigger, you want the bigger one.īut aperture isn’t everything. The result is that a larger telescope will show smaller dots when looking at a point source of light, so the telescope has more “pixels,” if you will, to assemble the image out of.Īll else being equal, the best telescope is the one with the largest aperture to let in the most light. The larger the opening, the more light gets through without rippling. Because light is just as much a wave as it is a particle, it ripples around the edge of the objective. The secondary function of a telescope is to increase the resolution of a target, so when you do magnify it, you’ll see it at a higher detail. The more light you gather, the brighter the image will be. See, the primary purpose of a telescope is not to magnify. Aperture is the size of the light-gathering element of the telescope, called the objective. If you take a look at the rating scheme we use for telescope reviews on this website, you’ll see that there are several important aspects of a telescope, but what our rating scheme lacks (intentionally) is perhaps the most important spec of the telescope: aperture. You didn’t think this was going to be an easy straight answer with a question as vague as that, right? There are two questions here. A lot of people think a big telescope will cost no less than a thousand dollars, and while it is very easy to spend about that much or more if you have that budget, there are certainly beginner-friendly, budget-friendly options available. Telescopes, as it turns out, are pretty affordable actually. “Three hundred dollars,” I calmly corrected. “Three hundred thousand!?” They exclaimed. An Apertura DT6 telescope, and a toy Celestron FirstScope, set up to do sidewalk astronomy in the parking lot of a popular gas station convenience store.
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