I want to buy my first telescope, but my choices seem very limited. Advice?

Hey /u/unholyAvocado, greetings from across the Danube ! It's certainly a bit more difficult in this part of the world to buy telescopes and the second hand market is much smaller but don't let that get you down, with patience good deals can be found.

First of all Astro Shop (which is one of the larger european sites) does deliver to Serbia and the delivery charge should be small (don't know about customs in your case so you should check that in advance), they usually have slightly better prices than local vendors here in Romania and a huge variety of stuff.

Second of all i actually have the Skywatcher 130/900 EQ2 and it's decent starting scope but you should take the following into consideration :

  • If you're only thinking about visual astronomy (no plans to do astrophotography) you shouldn't be looking into equatorial mounts at this price, it's simply not enough to buy you a reasonably stable one and you don't really gain anything from it if you just want to look. When using high magnification (10mm + barlow) there will be significant vibration of the image (this can be somewhat overcome by being very careful), if there is wind there's just no escaping it. For the moon for example this isn't so much of an issue but it will be quite frustrating for observing Saturn. The best value for money in visual astronomy is the dobsonian, so look for a 6".

  • If you want to expand into astrophotography the 130/900 EQ2 kind of has an advantage because you can buy a cheap motor for the RA axis and use the telescope mount as a tracker for your camera+lens and get decent enough results (this is the first shot i took using this set-up with a Nikon D3200 and a 135/2.8 lens - M31(Andromeda) but there is a lot of room for improvement) but honestly if you're thinking of astrophotography this is only something to play with, expect to pay much more money for actual good results

  • No matter what you want to do with it, the included finder scope is pretty shit, almost completely unusable if you wear glasses, you're better off with a red dot finder

  • The included barlow with mine was also pretty bad (though usable)

In conclusion, get a second hand dobsonian, if you can't find one then wait for a while (there must be a local astronomy forum with classifieds), it's the best choice by far on a tight budget.

/r/telescopes Thread