Unless you want to spend an arm and a leg in order to get fuzzy views of the Great Red Spot or Saturn's rings, the best astronomy tools for the amateur astronomer are your eyes. A decent pair of 8x30 binoculars are useful at times too. Most zoom binoculars are of inferior optical quality, so don't bother. For meteor showers, magnifying tools are your worst enemy as they cut down drastically the amount of sky you can see. The bins will get you seeing some nice double stars, such as the one in the middle of the Plough handle (a triple, actually, which binocs will reveal), and you can see the four big moons of Jupiter (there's a brilliant app for them). Decent kit for viewing things close up in anything like decent definition will cost you big mazumas.