Telescopes

I want to buy my boyfriend a telescope for his birthday. He is turning 25 on Feb 12 and he loves anything that has to do with space and earth. He is a beginner on Telescopes, but i want to buy him a really cool one that is easy to use and at a reasonable price. A telescope that you can see the planets with would be nice, like Saturns rings, and other cool things as well.

You can buy here
http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fs%3Furl%3Dsearch-alias%253Daps%26field-keywords%3Dtelescopes%2Bfor%2Bastronomy%26sprefix%3Dtelesc&tag=heatip09-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325

I have a Meade ETX 125-PE edition but it is broken now and I need a new one. I would like to begin looking at Astrophotography what good telescopes and equipment do you recommend?

Telescopes usually don’t "break." If the mount is not working properly, it can be repaired or replaced. An ETX125 is too good a telescope to just throw away!

Here are a few web pages with good information on beginner’s telescopes:
http://www.gaherty.ca/tme/TME0702_Buying_a_Telescope.pdf
http://www.scopereviews.com/begin.html
http://observers.org/beginner/j.r.f.beginner.html

For more advanced information, read Phil Harrington’s Star Ware, 4th edition (Wiley).

You’ll get the greatest value for your money with a Newtonian reflector on a Dobsonian mount, such as these:
http://www.telescope.com/control/category/~category_id=dobsonians/~pcategory=telescopes/~VIEW_INDEX=0/~VIEW_SIZE=1000000
http://www.skywatchertelescope.net/swtinc/product.php?class1=1&class2=106

Buy from a store which specializes in telescopes and astronomy, either locally or online; don’t buy from department stores, discount stores or eBay as mostly what they sell is junk. Find your local astronomy club and try out different Telescopes at one of their star parties:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/community/organizations

I strongly recommend that beginners steer clear of astrophotography until they have learned their way around the sky. Astrophotography is by far the most expensive and difficult area of amateur astronomy.

Many people who buy telescopes have no idea how to find interesting things to observe. A good introduction to finding things is NightWatch by Terence Dickinson (Firefly). A more advanced book is Star Watch by Phil Harrington (Wiley).

Read an article on line about this and I am not sure I understand how it works; the article actually referred to the Telescopes ability to photograph "back in time" and it lost me completely. I mean, does the telescope view what’s out there now and calculate backwards to come to a conclusion as to what the universe was like then? Anyone who can shed light, please do.

This is an effect caused by the speed of light and the vast distances in space.

For example, it takes about 8 minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth. So when we look at the sun, we’re actually seeing what it looked like when the light left it, 8 minutes ago. If the sun suddenly vanished or exploded, it would be 8 minutes before we could see it!

If we extend this to stars and galaxies that are very, very far away, the same holds true! The nearest star to us is about 4 Light years away. That means, it takes 4 years for the light to travel to us. So when we look at that star today, that is what it actually looked like 4 years after the light left that star!

Continuing in distance, we can see stars that are thousands and thousands of light years away. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is roughly 100,000 light years all the way across. So some stars we can see, we are actually seeing what they looked like almost 100,000 years ago.

And then there are other galaxies we can see, and these can be millions and millions of light years away. The furthest galaxies we’ve seen are about 13 BILLION light years away. So when we look at those galaxies, that is what they looked like 13 billion years ago!

We really are looking back in time! We won’t know what that galaxy looks like at THIS instant for another 13 billion years, once the light that leaves them right now reaches us at that point!

So, the farther away you look into space, the farther back in time you can look! Of course, there’s a limit to how far we can see: you can’t see farther than the age of the universe! This is because there hasn’t been enough time for light to travel that far. So if we get the distance of the farthest object that we can see, then we can roughly find out a minimum age of the universe! Scientists have estimated it at being a little over 13 billion years old, so that’s about as far back as we can look.

Hope this helped explain it for you!