(Aug 8, 2019 05:26 AM)Leigha Wrote: [ -> ]My backyard is on a small lake, and across from the lake, there is a wooded conservation area. It's very serene and quiet at night, and the sky is filled with stars, when it's not overcast. I'd like to buy a telescope, not a cheap one, but not a super expensive one. Just curious if any of you own one, and what should I look for in terms of quality? (Thanks in advance for any help)
I have a couple of telescopes. I live in Seattle (overcast a lot) and it has plenty of light pollution so I used mine a lot at first but not so much now. It sounds like you are in a better environment.
There are a lot of factors.
The mount is probably the most important and how hard everything is to set up and how much you are likely to want to do. Aperture is important of course and knowing how you want to use it and what you want to use it for (planets, binary star resolving, deep space objects, photography).
You will either get a smaller refractor or a larger reflector. If you don't want a lot of set up, you just want to mainly look at some planets and resolve some binary stars then a 90 mm refractor will do the job. That's mainly what I use now.
I also have an 8" reflector that doesn't work at the moment. It's heavy to set up and takes longer mainly due to the heavy counter-weights and having to take apart and reassemble parts of the mount. With the refractor I can have it set up in a few minutes. Mead and Celestron are two popular makers of telescopes. I think it's also important to get a motorized focuser or get it as an add on. You will probably want to buy a much better wide angle eyepiece lens than the one that comes with the telescope.
Light gathering is what matters with a telescope (not magnification) and reducing vibration is also important (so good mount and a motorized focuser).
It's one of those things where you either want to keep it relatively inexpensive but have everything that you buy be good quality or the sky is the limit with photography and electronic automatic object finding.
For most people it's going to be best to buy a basic refractor with few bells and whistles. If you like it and want to spend a lot more, you can more easily sell that and then spend the "big money" when you have more experience and know what is involved and what you like.
Most of the great views you see didn't look like that to the person looking though the eyepiece. Those are longer camera exposures with many shots stacked together using software. It's very expensive to get to the point where you can do that. Since you don't see those by looking though an eyepiece you can just as easily see those on your computer via the internet (other people's pictures) and save yourself the money.
It's nice to have a motor that tracks the movement of Earth but you can also do it manually and keep costs down as well. To use that kind of thing you still have to set it up properly each time and triangulate on stars first (especially for electronic systems that find objects for you).
There is only so much that anyone can see though a telescope anyway. For me it really peaked my interest, gave me a lot of practical knowledge and then I found it more interesting reading about aspects of astro-physics that you can't see though a telescope. Stephen Hawking said that he rarely looked though telescopes, even when he was more able to do so.
I'll stop here but if you have specific questions I'll be glad to answer those.