I bought a small telescope years ago. I have used it mostly for viewing the Moon and the planets, and to a lesser extent stars and galaxies.
This photo is one I found on the web. It is of the crater Petavius. On my very first viewing of the Moon through my telescope, I actually saw a meteorite land in this crater!
I took that incident as "welcome to the world of astronomy!"
@ABCDEF7 You would be surprised at how much can be seen even through a very modest telescope.
The main challenge in viewing distant objects is not magnification, but the ability to gather light. I can focus on Mars, and I see a small dot. If I switch to higher magnification, the image gets bigger, but it gets dimmer. So, I can actually see more detail at lower magnification than at a higher one.
A more expensive telescope would have a larger mirror, to gather more light, so that higher magnifications are more useful than in a smaller scope.
But the moon is so bright, that even an inexpensive small scope can handle relatively high magnification. And of course the meteorite that zipped through my field of view ever-so-briefly was reflecting sunlight , so I saw a small but bright point of light move across the lunar surface and strike it.
