I have to tell you that this a very challenging column to write because there are so many choices to make if you have a stargazing buff on your holiday gift giving list.

Amateur astronomy is a lot like many other hobbies in that you can spend an astronomical amount of money (horrible pun) in a very short amount of time. You don’t want to get too cheap though and wind up with junk.

I’ve learned that lesson the hard way too many times. You have to buy smart and you also need some guidance, which I humbly hope I can provide for you. It is possible to buy a telescope for less than $500 and would be a worthwhile gift for ages from about 12 years through adult.

When the subject of telescope purchasing comes up at my star parties I always like to ask the folks; “Do you want me to be nice or do you want me to be honest?”

Of course they want me to be honest so I tell them, and I’ll tell you, that I would avoid buying telescopes at “big box” stores, because quite frankly there’s a lot of junky scopes out there.

I don’t think they’re trying to put one over on you; it’s simply because the buyers for these stores are responsible for so much merchandise that they just don’t have the time to extensively research everything they put on the shelves or on their websites.

I believe the best place to purchase a telescope is from a specialty store where you can ask an expert questions. Unfortunately there’s not all that many astronomy and telescope shops around.

That’s why the Internet is such a great deal for telescope shopping. In my opinion the best site is telescopes.com, but there are others as well like Amazon.com, or just browse in the word telescopes, stand back and watch all the offerings on your screen. There’s also eBay, but I would be really careful there, especially with used telescopes.

Top brandsIn my opinion, the best telescope brands are Celestron, Orion and Meade, and for under $500 the two most popular kinds of telescopes are refractors and Newtonian reflectors.Refractors are what most people think of when they visualize telescopes. Light comes in through a lens at one end and you look through an eyepiece at the other end.Refractors are OK, but I think the best kind of telescope is some kind of Newtonian reflector because I truly believe you get the most bang for your buck with them.They’re called Newtonians because the basic optical design came from none other than Sir Isaac Newton back in the 17th century.The most important thing a telescope can do for you is gather light from whatever you’re observing. Newtonian telescopes do that with a concave parabolic mirror that sits in the back of the scope and reflects and intensifies the image of whatever you’re gazing at back to what’s known as the focal point near a diagonally orientated flat mirror at the front of the scope.From there, the image is directed through a hole in the side of the telescope and into an eyepiece.The larger the mirror, the more light you can gather in, and the better your view will be. In fact, reflector telescopes are sold by the diameter of their primary mirrors. For less than $500 you can get up to an eight inch reflector telescope that will do a really nice job for you.I wouldn’t pay much less than $300 or you’ll get a scope that you probably won’t be very happy with, and it will probably wind up in a closet never to be seen again.Also, I would recommend what’s known as a Dobsonian reflector, which is a Newtonian reflector that sits in a very easy to operate cradle box mount that you can easily move up and down and back and forth.Magnification in reflectors or any other scopes is determined by the eyepiece you use.Telescopes usually come with two or three different eyepieces that give you different levels of magnification. Magnification or “power” takes a back seat to light gathering because the more light you can gather into your scope and into your eyepiece the clearer the image is going to be at higher magnifications.There is what’s called a limiting magnification for all scopes where you reach a point that you can no longer get a reasonably clear image.

Mirror, mirrorIn the case of reflector scopes, the larger your mirror the higher the limiting magnification you’ll have. For most objects like star clusters, nebula, planets and galaxies all you need is 150 to 200 power, which will make it appear 150 to 200 times bigger than what you would see with your naked eye.For the moon you might want to use 300 power but not much more than that.As far as specific recommendations I still have to go with Dobsonian (Newtonian) telescopes from Orion telescopes.There are several options that can you can check out on their website at telescopes.com. At the low end of the price range I would go with the Orion StarBlast 6 Astro Reflector Telescope that sells for $250.It has a six-inch diameter mirror that I think is the minimum mirror size you can have and still have a worthwhile view. It doesn’t have a classic style Dobsonian mounting but it’s still easy to use.For yet another year my best recommendation for a telescope under $500 is honestly a little over $500, but well worth the extra money. It’s the SkyQuest XT8 IntelliScope from Orion that goes for $540. It has a larger eight-inch mirror that gives you almost twice as much light gathering ability as the Orion StarBlast 6, but it is still very portable for those fun stargazing road trips.What also really makes it worth the extra dough is that it comes with a small computerized object locator that can save you a bunch of time locating faint sky targets.In a perfect world you should learn how to find faint celestial targets like galaxies, star clusters and nebula using star maps and charts, and learn what’s known as the “star hopping” method, but that takes a lot of time and dedication.I think it’s a valuable skill that should be learned, but it’s very difficult to do if you have any issues with light pollution, and that’s when the computerized object locator can come to the rescue. We have the technology, so why not use it?Now of course you can spend a heck of a lot more than $500 on telescopes. Just ask my wife. You can get telescopes with a lot more light gathering ability as well as scopes that actually point themselves at whatever you want to look at and then track that object across the sky, keeping up with the Earth’s rotation.You can also get into taking celestial photographs though telescopes and that can run into some huge money if you really want to do it right.

Acclimate to airA VERY important thing you have to do with any telescope, no matter how expensive or reasonable, is to let it sit outside for at least a half an hour before you use it. The optics have to acclimate to local temperature or your view of anything through the scope can be really messed up and fuzzy.For something completely different, there’s a really neat website called “Slooh” where you can actually operate a remote telescope and even operate astronomical cameras. You can buy gift subscriptions for as low as $19.95 a month or get a better deal with longer one or two year subscriptions. Find out more at www.slooh.com.Again, there are many options out there. Happy shopping!