I agree with the other recommendation to go with binoculars for your first foray into assisted sky viewing.

Another point in favor of binoculars for people living out of the city is that places out of the city often have more wildlife. Binoculars can be great for observing that.

When choosing binoculars there are a couple tradeoffs. Binoculars are listed as M x D, where M is the magnification and D is the diameter of the lenses in mm. For M here are some considerations:

• Bigger M makes things look bigger.

• Bigger M also reduces the field of view.

• The smaller the field of view the steadier you will need to be able to hold the binoculars to keep something in the field of view. A magnification of 15 for example would probably be useless for most people who are not using a tripod and trying to keep a flying bird in view. Actually it would probably even by hard with a tripod. But for looking at something that isn't moving (or whose apparent motion is very slow like a planet) 15 might work by hand and would be a piece of cake with a tripod.

For D some considerations are:

• The bigger the D the more light the lenses gather, letting you see dimmer objects.

• The bigger the D the more the binoculars weigh which makes it harder to keep them steady without a tripod and tires you out faster.

Another thing you might want to consider is the "close focus distance". Binoculars can focus on things from the close focus distance to infinity. For binoculars meant for astronomy the close focal distance can be 50 feet or more. Not a problem when you are looking at the Moon, but might be if you want to take a look at a squirrel frolicking in your yard.

Binoculars meant for wildlife will have a much shorts close focal distance. For example I've got Celestron's Nature DX 8x42 binoculars [1] and their close focus distance is 6.5 feet.