Sadly, you can't get much of a telescope for $400 or less. Your best bet would be a Dobson. They have no tracking but have fairly large mirrors. Take a look:
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You can probably manage an 8" Dobsonian on your budget. The Dob is the best way to get a lot of aperture at modest cost. It's also a much more stable mount that most small tripod mounts.

Try and look to the right and click on Starter Telescopes (under $400). The will show some of the higher end telescopes from Meade and Celestron. These are companies that have been around for more than 40 years.

you can't ever get a good tripod for $ 400. My advise to you is save about $3,000 and get yourself a decent scope. You say that you had a couple scopes before, and you will not see any difference in a scope for $400. I have a 8" Meade lx200gps sct, and I wish I got something a little bit bigger, but am glad that I didn't , because these scopes are heavy.

Hey you should email robin the astronomer! He is Astro here in yahoo answers and he helped me get a great one! I posted the same question justabout & he answered and so I emailed him at

and he is really cool! He is helping me find comets right now. And he told me what eyepieces to get and i'm really happy with my telescope!
Glad I bought one!! Stars are amazing to look at in it!

and paul is wrong about the tripod! the astronomer will tell you how to get one for $400 !!

You don't actually see farther, you just collect more light.

The more aperture your telescope has, the more light it will collect and the more you will be able to see. If you want to see a lot of deep space objects, such as galaxies, you need a fairly large telescope.

The largest telescope you can get for your money would be a dobsonian. If you can manage $500 then you can buy a 10" Zhummell Dobsonian. This is a serious deep sky telescope and you will probably be very very happy with it.

The downside is, it's a dobsonian, so you won't be able to do astrophotography with it.

If you can't exceed $400 then the largest telescope you can buy would be an 8" Dobsonian. You will not be able to buy a large tripod mounted telescope for $400 though. At least not new.

If you are willing to buy used you may be able to find an old Celestron C8 or and 8" or 10" Meade Starfinder on a german equatorial mount.

Look around at these sites: (where you can buy the Zhummell) (forums and classifieds)