Choosing a beginners telescope can be overwhelming. Unless you are already familiar with the various types of telescopes, you are likely to be confused and daunted.

With reflectors and refractors, cata-whatsits and go-to's, aperture, focal length and eyepieces, choosing a good beginners telescope might seem a nightmarish task.

There are several factors to juggle, from the practical ones like size and storage to the technical ones and the price you can afford but this little guide will help to reduce the confusion.

In a broad-sweep way of looking at things, the larger the aperture the more you can get out of your telescope. This is because you are capturing more light which allows you more flexibility with magnification. Magnification however is a two edged sword. Too much magnification and you ruin your chances at seeing anything other than blobs of smudged light.

Magnification is really achieved by the eyepiece, not the tube. Different eyepieces will give different magnifications. Take the focal length of the telescope, divide it by the eyepiece focal length and you get the magnification factor for that combination. So a 1000mm tube with a 10mm eyepiece gives us a magnification factor of 100x

Telescopes do have a maximum practical magnification however and this is where we tie this back to my earlier statement about aperture. The maximum practical magnification can generally be consided as twice the aperture size in millimeters. So a 90mm refractor can be thought of as having a maximum achievable magnification of 180x and this in excellent viewing conditions.

It is usually best to stay well within the upper limit to produce a good sharp image especially if viewing conditins are not their best.

Reflector Telescopes use a mirror for gathering light and then reflect that light to the eyepiece on the side of the tube via another small mirror (the secondary mirror).

Reflectors tend to offer a combination of medium to large apertures with ease of use and are most often used for amateur astronomy. They are particularly popular with kids and young adults and give excellent aperture for your dollar.

Very large reflectors are sometimes mounted on simple turntables known as Dobsonian mounts. They are easy to use and their large apertures offer excellent deep-sky viewing, if you are in a good dark sky location.

Refractor Telescopes have their primary lens at the front end of the tube and refract (bend) the light to the eyepiece on the back end of the telescope. Very much what you might think of when you think of the early astronomers.

They tend to produce nice sharp images because of the lack of reflection (all reflection lose a little bit of light at every mirror surface) and are usually the better choice in the suburbs where light pollution is an issue.

Small refractors are popular with those who just want to 'grab it and watch it' without spending much time on setting up.

Large refractors tend to be long, heavy and difficult to use, they are also expensive due to the amount of glass work involved so tend to be relatively rarely used in practice.

Catadioptric Telescopes such as the Schmidt-Cassegrain & Maksutov-Cassegrain, combine large apertures with short tubes. They achieve this by reflecting the gathered light twice inside the tube before passing it out to the eyepiece.

Catadioptric telescopes are often mounted on motorized and computerized mounts known as go-to mounts, making navigation a matter of entering the targets name or catalogue number into the hand-held controller.

Their more complicated construction tends to make them expensive but their all round capabilities make them very popular with keen amateurs.

Check out more on all these types of telescopes at TelescopeChoice.com

So now you have the basics you can work within these next two factors. As we are talking about beginners telescopes I have deliberately not tried to allow for more advanced uses such as astro-photography, that's a whole other bunch of considerations and best tackled after and separately to the beginner stage.

Obviously there is no point in buying yourself a telescope that is unlikely to be used due to its size or the time taken to set it up properly. A simple small refractor may not offer the viewing power of a big Dobsonian but you can just grab it and set it up real quick anytime, it is obviously portable so it can easily be taken on trips away from the city too.

A large Dobsonian or Catadioptric on the other hand offers so much viewing but really needs to be setup in a good dark-sky site for maximum effect and is useless to apartment dwellers.

Only you can tell where and how you are likely to use your new telescope so you'll have to steer between the two extremes. This is probably why so many stores see beginners steer the middle path and end up with a reflector of around 114mm aperture. Big enough to see Saturn and Mars and enjoy far away galaxies (especially from a good dark site), much cheaper than an equivalent refractor yet still easy enough to set up fairly quickly and small enough to be able to put in the trunk if travelling. Its a good mix!

My pick of the ones available right now?: The Celestron Astromaster 114EQ