About a month ago I purchased an entry level telescope (Meade TeleStar RB-60). I thought the kids would really get a kick out of it. As it turns out, Tyler could care less. Yeah, I should have seen that one coming. Oh well...
On Friday night I took the family out by Hagg Lake and we set up the telescope. It was amazing! Venus was setting in the west, and a couple degrees above it was Saturn. We could see the crescent on Venus really clear, and the rings of Saturn? Yeah, we saw them. It wasn't crystal clear and up front in your face, but you could clearly see that it was Saturn you were looking at. Carrie got a kick out of it, as did Jasmine. Before we packed up and headed home we turned to the southeast and could see a really bright star which I was thinking must have been another planet. After I turned the telescope on it I could make out four really light starts right next to it. As it turns out, we were looking at Jupiter and 4 of its moons. Jasmine was going crazy at this point and she started asking if we could next look at Pluto and Uranus. We then took turns checking out the surface of the moon (it was also a full moon that night, sheesh). This experience was really good for the family, and I'm really looking forward to future outings and more powerful telescopes.
Advice on Buying a Telescope
It's been about a year since Carrie and I started talking about buying a telescope. We took some advice given by other sky-watchers to first buy a pair of binoculars. That way if you later realize that gazing at the stars isn't really your thing, you really haven't wasted anything because the binoculars can be used for so much more. This is a very good idea, both for managing risks but also as a great way to get into star-gazing. I couldn't believe how big the Harvest Moon was last fall as I was checking it out through our set of binoculars. Wow, that got me hooked.
A couple months after we bought the binoculars we decided to take the next step and subscribe to an actual astronomy magazine (SkyAndTelescope.com). They have a great website, but more importantly by receiving the printed magazine we were able to see if we really were interested enough to pick it up and read an article 6-8 months later.
Once we both agreed that we wanted to renew our subscription to the Sky and Telescope magazine, we knew that it was finally time to get an entry level telescope. After our first family star-gazing experience last weekend, it didn't take much to get Carrie to start talking about looking for used telescopes on Craigslist. We'll most likely wait at least a year before we get a bigger telescope. Eventually I'd like to get into astrophotography, which is a very expensive hobby. No hurry on that, I still need to improve my regular photography knowledge and skill set first.