Which Telescope

[Mark Allen]

My girlfriend recently told me she has always had a fascination with stars and everything else out there, so I want to buy her a good telescope that hopefully will keep her interested for years to come, she wants to look at the moon, also the planets and possibly galaxies  but, I am a complete novice with telescopes, and my brain is now battered looking at different ones, reading reviews, and questions that people have asked and reading the replies on Amazon, ihave narrowed it down to 2 telescopes ( I think there practically the same ), the Celestron 21049 powerseeker 127eq reflector telescope and the Celestron 31045 astromaster 130eq, any advice from you knowledgeable people would be greatly appreciated.

[PEMS]

I would suggest something fairly small and simple, the 127 sounds like it could be a Mak type scope. They tend to have long focal lengths and so a narrow field of view which means not so simple and easy.

The other thing I would suggest is ask her and get input from her.

Here you will get told what others like me would get or want or think good. That is very likely not what she would choose for herself. Scopes are somewhat personal so get what she wants, not what someone else wants.

The easiest is probably a reasonable 80mm refractor. One around f/8 to minimise chromatic aberration. Maybe check the ES and Bresser sites.

For safety read the details of the 130. Just it might have a focal length of around 1000mm and a tube of around 500mm. If so avoid. They have a spherical mirror and a built in barlow. They just do not work well.

[Ricochet]

@Mark Allen, of the two telescopes, the Astromaster will be the superior telescope. The Powerseeker 127 is notorious for being poor. It is a Jones-Bird style telescope with a cheap "corrector" in the focuser, which can be detected by spotting that it is a Newtonian type design of telescope with a focal length that is clearly much longer than the length of the tube. The Astromaster, on the other hand is a typical 130mm, f5 Newtonian which should be optically better. 

Normally, i would suggest that you buy any telescope from a specialist astronomy retailer, however, this year we have had the dual impact of many more people buying telescopes and the supply chain being interrupted, which means that telescopes are in short supply. Due to this, I would advise that you instead use the product listings at firstlightoptics.com as a rough gauge of quality. If FLO sell a telescope, you can assume that it is at least reasonable quality and buying it would be a reasonably good bet. If they don't sell it, then I would not buy it without first getting some opinions from people here, rather than looking at reviews on Amazon, which in my experience, appear to almost always have been written by people with absolutely no experience or idea what makes a telescope good or bad. 

Additionally, FLO have a telescopes in stock page, which shows which telescope packages they currently have in stock. If you look around the website you will be able to find some OTA listings that are also in stock but not listed on the in stock page. Any OTA listing is for the telescope only, if you buy one of those you will have to buy the mount and tripod separately (and possibly some starter eyepieces).

[PXR-5]

Run from the Power Seeker!

 

The Astromaster would be the better choice of those two.