Thinking of buying a telescope? Thinking of treating yourself or perhaps a child to such an educational present? Beware the gift actually meets with your expectations and encourages the user to learn.
Unfortunately you will find a lot of terrible telescopes on the market as well as more of them in the shops at Christmas time. These poor high quality telescopes are often offered in division and low cost stores where the staff don't know one finish from the other and are merely not experienced sufficient to provide you with any actual advice.
These telescopes often come in extraordinary looking containers total with artists impressions and photos of faraway planets and nebulae all in crisp clear colour. The truth is far eliminated from those images! Most of those low cost low cost store scopes are made with poor quality glass, mirrors and eyepieces. If that's not bad enough, they also include flimsy mounts that shake and vibrate so a lot they spoil what small see you might have had achieved anyway.
One specific warning you should heed is to watch out for the kind that come with large daring lettering boasting of 600x magnification or other large quantity. An professional would not think like that because magnification isn't the objective, achieving a great view will be the prime goal.
An over-magnified image is only a fuzzy blob and as a result pointless to have. Also you won't be seeing a lot colour apart from that from your nearby planets, those stunning pictures of nebulae are generally photos taken from your Hubble Space Telescope!
Also don't get fixated on the size of the scope simply because those larger scopes tend not to perform at their best within the cities and suburbs where mild pollution is this kind of an issue. Remember the smaller the scope the easier it is to use so it will tend to get utilized much more and there is no stage investing cash on a scope that does not get utilized much!
Now if you would like some real advice on how you can choose a telescope or want some recommendations on good but low cost scopes for different situations then take a look at the articles linked beneath.