Where can I get cheap telescopes?

You can get a "light bucket" Newtonian-Dobsonian from a number of mail-order places for fairly cheap. I would go for aperature... 8" minimum and get fewer scope... maybe one instead of a number of them.

If you wanted to get something the whole class could see at once... maybe a Meade or Clestron 10"+ with a CCD camera and plug that into an LCD monitor (a computer monitor) so the whole class can see it. There are image intensifiers out there too that let you see images of things that normally it takes a film/ccd many minutes to absorb enough photons to form am image (Nebula... galaxies, etc).

The small 90 to 120 mm Maksuktov style Meades with the robotics for finding and tracking objects are very popular.

If you had posted your budget I could have told you exactly what to buy... possibly you could post to some Amateur Astronomy sites or some local clubs and see if they would sponsor something for your class. You may end up getting something free that way... many astronomy clubs are chartered to draw kids (future scientists) into the hobby and getting an entire class involved and year after year would be a major coupe in the minds of myself and many.

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