Buying a telescope, dont know what

Yeah, if you are seeing about 20-50 stars, you might not be able to see much with any affordable scope. Even if you did, it wouldn't be that great in my opinion.

Planets are good targets when you have bad light pollution.

I'd get something like an 8" Schmidt Cassegrain on an alt-azimuth mount i.e. Nexstar 8SE or Evolution. Good all around scope and very easy to use. Plus they have goto and tracking which are especially useful for a beginner. A big dobson mount reflector will potentially show more but they're much heavier and less portable. And a pain in the ass to use compared to an SCT.

originally posted by: XL5
Yeah, if you are seeing about 20-50 stars, you might not be able to see much with any affordable scope. Even if you did, it wouldn't be that great in my opinion.

That's why you take it to star parties under dark skies. Another good reason to own a Schmidt-Cassegrain. They're very portable.

I would get the Celestron 11" Edge, you could get some great photos with it, and visual observation would be good also. A big dobsonian is going to get better views, but it's not as portable or good for astrophotography. I personally have a couple refractors and a couple reflectors. My refractors are 900mm f12 and 500mm f5.6, reflectors are 600mm f7 and 1000mm f9.5. More important is a decent computerized EQ mount. I have a Celestron AVX, and it does great. It is very convenient to just input catalog numbers and have the scope slew to your target. I use my my refractors for photography, mainly my 900mm. I would use my reflectors for photography, but they don't have enough back focus to attach a camera. If you go with a nice cassegrain on a computerized EQ than you will have to do some reading on polar alignment, drift alignment, and other various things. You will need to also learn to stack frames, calibrate images for noise, but it is pretty easy. Here is a list of free software that is essential for learning the night sky, and also processing astrophotographs - Stellarium, DeepSkyStacker, Registax6, Autostakkert, PIPP, VirtualDub, Gimp.

These are some photographs that I have taken through my 900mm refractor and a Nikon DSLR. I've been doing it for almost a year now, and it is very fun. I just got my 500mm f5.6 achromatic doublet, and still haven't taken her out yet. I've spent a little over a grand for my equipment, so you can get some really good stuff with a $3k-$5k budget

...whatever you are going to buy, post some of your pictures here

Astronomy is very nice hobby

I don't think he'll be posting anything real soon..