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Star Gazing

What kind/strength of binoculars are best for star gazing?

What kind of things do you look for when buying binoculars if you're buying them for star gazing? Telescopes tend to be quite big and I don't really understand much about them either! Cheers!!

The headline specification for binos tends to be given as two figures in the form AxB where A is the magnification and B is the size of the objective lenses - this controls how much light they take in and therefore how dim an object you can see. If you are using binos hand held then generally I would advise against anything more powerful than 10x (and preferably a little less) since the image will become unusably jerky and paradoxically allow you to see less than a lower power pair. In terms of objective size, 50mm is usually about the limit that you can hand hold for long periods, especially if they are good quality. There are some cheap, lightweight mostly plastic binos out there but you want to avoid those at all costs. If you want larger than 50mm aperture or higher than 10x power you really need a bino mount, but beware - a good bino mount is comparable in price to a basic telescope and takes almost as long to set up. Ignore those brackets that fit on top a photo tripod - they are hopeless unless the object you want to view is just above the horizon.

The nearest there is to a "standard" size for astronomy is 7x50 which makes very efficient use of the available light. However the pupils of people over their mid thirties may well not expand sufficiently to use all that light so a slightly more aggressive power/aperture ratio is often recommended for older people - either a higher power pair of 10x50s or a smaller (and cheaper) pair of 7 or 8x42s.

When buying binoculars you can pay basically as much or as little as you want. 50mm binos start at perhaps £40 or $50 but you are really best avoiding them - binos at that price point will have significant issues - there are no genuine bargains out there. At around the £80 or $100 level you have some decent basic pairs appropriate for a beginner but you do get what you pay for - the $250 pairs will be infinitely better still and the $1000+ pairs still more refined. Image stabilised binos are worth their weight in gold but expect to pay at least $500 for a decent pair.

Things to look for, mostly at the lower end of the spectrum:

Fully coated: cuts down internal reflections inside the binos that gives dimmer images. Fully multi-coated is even better. Binos simply described as "coated" are probably best avoided since it usually means only the outer surfaces are treated.

Tripod mounting bush: although I don't like bino mounts there is no reason to get binos that don't fit to them.

Porro prisms (where the objective lenses are wider that the eyepieces): these give better views for astronomy than the in-line roof prism binos, at least unless we are talking about very high end binos.

Lens caps and a rigid case: anything that protects your binos when not in use is a good idea.

BaK-4 optical glass (at least at the lower end of the market): this performs better than BK-7 glass used in some models. Avoid any cheap models that don't tell you what glass they use since it may not be even that. However, going up market (in the hundreds of dollars territory) they may not say again as they begin to adopt proprietary glasses.

Finally, for low cost binos (under the $250 price point) I would strongly recommend recommend porro prisms rather than roof prisms. Low cost roof prisms tend to suffer from diffraction spikes making them less useful for astronomy. The two prisms are easy to tell apart because for porro prisms the objective lenses are more widely spaced than the eyepieces. For roof prisms they are in line with each other.

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