BingBumpier
BingBumpier
You do not need a telescope to start enjoying astronomy. The naked eye sees thousands of stars on a dark night, all five planets visible without aid (Mercury through Saturn), the Andromeda Galaxy, a handful of bright star clusters, and the entire Milky Way as a band of light across the sky. The single biggest upgrade is not equipment — it is getting somewhere dark.
Spend a few nights learning ten or fifteen constellations from your latitude. The Big Dipper, Orion, Cassiopeia, the Summer Triangle, and Scorpius are good starting points in the northern hemisphere. Once you know where they are, the rest of the sky has anchors. A free planetarium app like Stellarium or SkySafari makes this much easier.
Track the Moon for a month. Watch how it moves through the sky, when it rises and sets, and how its phase changes. This is the foundation that makes everything else more interesting.
Get binoculars before a telescope. A pair of 10×50 binoculars is around eighty dollars new, works during the day too, and shows you Jupiter's moons, lunar craters, the Pleiades, the Andromeda Galaxy, and dozens of nebulae and star clusters. They are also a third the weight of a telescope and require zero setup. Many lifelong amateur astronomers do most of their observing through binoculars.
A six-inch or eight-inch Dobsonian reflector is the consensus first telescope. Three to five hundred dollars new. Simple to use, low maintenance, and provides much more light-gathering capability than the small department-store refractors that disappoint so many beginners. Skip anything that prominently advertises magnification on the box — aperture is what matters.