The Best Telescope
How important is the quality of a telescope? To what extent does optical quality affect how much you can see and how well you can see it? Provided that you don’t own one of those 2 inch in diameter, 600x refractors, advertised by some discount department stores, telescope “quality” is vastly overrated. Other factors are much more important. 1. The transparency of the sky. This one is obvious. If it’s cloudy, you can’t see anything. And even a slight amount of haze makes a huge difference when you are trying to observe faint objects. 2. The amount of light pollution at your observing site. To see many faint objects well (or at all), there must be sufficient contrast between them and the background sky. That’s why many catalogs of deep-sky objects list the “surface brightness” together with the overall magnitude. Even bright objects don’t show up very well when that brightness is spread out over a large area. Light polluted skies...