[pieceofthepuzzle]

“For astronomy, you'll get the best bang for your buck with a 6 or 8 inch reflector (Dobsonian) telescope.”

Good advice. You need to really do your homework. A bad telescope, like a cheap musical instrument, will be very frustrating. Meade has great scopes, and some are fairly inexpensive, but you can run up the price fairly quickly.

Oh, there are also some online ways to purchase time on telescopes, including some observatory telescopes. You can rent time on the telescope, tell them where you want to look, and they will link the telescope images to you. Here's some links for some:

http://www.lightbuckets.com/

http://www.cherrymountainobservatory.com/Docs/ObservatoriesOnTheWeb.pdf

http://www.universetoday.com/52114/online-telescope/

Good Luck!

[smokingfrog]

Interesting. Didn’t know there was such a thing as an online telescope.