Should I focus more on Aperture or Focal Length for a telescope?

Question

Let's assume there are three types of telescopes with the following specifications:

    Telescope                  Aperture              Focal Length
    --------------------------------------------------------------
    Example 1                     70 mm                    400 mm
    Example 2                     60 mm                    700 mm
    Example 3                     60 mm                    900 mm

As a beginner, should I look for a higher value in the aperture or the focal length?

Answer 1

There is one rule that is generally true for all deep sky objects (nebulae, stars, galaxies,...): Aperture matters!

For solar system objects, aperture is not that important.

The second most important thing is: What size are the objects you want to look at: Small objects need long focal lengths and high magnifications, large objects need short aperture for low magnifications.

With 400mm you could watch objects like:

• Andromeda galaxy core
• Orion nebula, other large emission or reflective nebulae (e.g. Pleiades)
• large star clusters
• low magnification lunar observations

With 900mm you could watch objects like

• Planets (Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, ...)
• high magnification lunar observations
• planetary nebulae (e.g. ring nebula)

Note that 60 and 70mm aperture are still very small for telescopes! The aperture influences two things:

• Light sensitvity: The larger the aperture, the more light you can collect. Very important if you live in a city!
• Maximum resolution: Rule of thumb is that you can do aperture in mm times two as maximum magnification. I.e. for 60mm a 120x magnification is the absolute maximum which still is feasible.

The magnification is created by the eyepiece. E.g. when you have a 400mm focal length telescope and use a 10mm eyepiece, you get 400mm/10mm = 40x magnification.

Note: the shorter the eyepiece focal length, the more difficult it is to build. Good 5mm eyepieces can cost 100 USD and up. I personally started with a 750mm Newtonian with 150mm aperture and 25mm and 10mm eyepieces. That's a good allrounder, even though planets will appear rather small with the 10mm eyepiece. But you can later invest more money in good eyepieces, which you can re-use on better telescopes which you may buy later on.

Edit: One more thing -- the telescope mount is equally important as are the eyepieces and the telescope itself. A mount that fits the telescope easily is as expensive as the optical tube assembly itself. Hence many beginners start out with a Dobson telescope, which uses a very, very simple yet sturdy mount.

Answer 2

It depends on what you plan on using it for. For dimmer, deep sky objects you should be concerned with the balance of aperture and focal length (with a focus on aperture for light gathering power). For brighter objects, like the Moon or the solar system planets you probably don't need much light gathering power (aperture) so a long focal length for imaging finer details should be ok. Just a reminder though: never look at the Sun without proper filters, you'll go blind instantly, and looking at the Moon without filters will wreck your night vision and may hurt at first.

Answer 3

Right or wrong, myself as a beginner I started my decision based on aperture to get the appropriate light gathering ability for my area. At that point focal length became pretty much a non-issue. My choices were down to 2, and 1 of them would have been long enough that getting it outside easily would have been difficult.