14 telescopes, each scored against the same four purposes with the same weights. Every one of them is a legitimate choice for something and a poor choice for something else.
Showing all 14 telescopes
Schmidt-CassegrainOTA only
A superb long-focal-length instrument that will expose every weakness in your mount, your seeing and your guiding before it shows you what it can do.
Schmidt-Cassegrain
The most portable telescope here that is still a serious instrument, and the easiest complete package to actually get outside on a weeknight.
Schmidt-Cassegrain
The most capable complete package here for planets and small deep-sky objects, on a mount that is at its honest limit carrying it.
Rowe-Ackermann Schmidt AstrographCamera onlyOTA only
The fastest way to collect deep-sky photons at this aperture, sold to people who must accept that there is no eyepiece and never will be.
Ritchey-ChretienOTA only
The cheapest honest route to real galaxy image scale, provided you accept that collimating a Ritchey-Chretien is a skill you will have to acquire.
Apochromatic refractorOTA only
The classic do-everything four-inch apo: excellent visually, capable on nebulae with a flattener, and never the cheapest way to any single goal.
DobsonianDiscontinued
No longer made, but a used XT8 in good condition remains one of the best-value visual telescopes you can own.
Dobsonian
More light grasp per unit of money than anything else on this site, on the simplest mount ever devised, with no imaging future whatsoever.
ED refractorOTA only
The most sensible entry into wide-field deep-sky imaging, provided you budget for the flattener it does not include.
Newtonian reflector
Good optics on a mount that is adequate for looking and marginal for photographing. Buy it to observe, not as an imaging platform in disguise.
Imaging NewtonianOTA only
Enormous imaging aperture for the money, sold to people who underestimate what f/4 and 8.5 kg do to a mount.
Maksutov-CassegrainOTA only
The best lunar and planetary view available from a telescope this small, bought at the cost of a very narrow field and a long cooldown.
Achromatic refractorOTA only
A cheap, light, genuinely fun rich-field refractor for sweeping the Milky Way, badly miscast as a planetary or imaging telescope.
Petzval refractorCamera onlyOTA only
A tiny, expensive, almost foolproof wide-field astrograph. You are paying for the fact that nothing about the optical train can go wrong.
Try widening the aperture or focal-length range, or clear the filters and start again.