Buying guide

Your first telescope

The single most useful thing to know before you spend anything: magnification is not a specification, it is a choice of eyepiece. Aperture is the specification. Everything below follows from that.

We do not currently earn anything from these links. Nobody pays to appear here. How we pick gear.

The one number that matters

A telescope is a light bucket. The width of the opening, the aperture, decides how many photons you collect, and photons are the entire product. A 130mm mirror gathers about seventy percent more light than a 100mm lens, which is the difference between a galaxy being visible and being theoretical.

Any box advertising "525x magnification" is selling you a number that means nothing. Earth's atmosphere caps useful magnification at roughly 250x on an excellent night, and a small telescope pushed past its limit shows you a bigger, dimmer, blurrier version of the same thing. The magnification claim on the box is the clearest signal that a telescope is aimed at people who will not use it twice.

The second thing that matters, which nobody tells you

The best telescope is the one you carry outside. A large instrument that takes twenty minutes to set up gets used on perfect nights only, which in most climates means four times a year. Something you can pick up with one hand and put on a garden table gets used on a Tuesday because the sky happened to be clear. Over a year the small one shows you more. This is why the consensus first telescope is a tabletop Dobsonian rather than anything with a tripod and a computer.

What to buy

The one most people should buy

Sky-Watcher Heritage 130P

$305
130mm (5.1 inch) tabletop Dobsonian, 650mm f/5

The most telescope you can buy for the money, and the one most likely to actually get used.

Aperture is the spec that decides what you can see, and 130mm of it for around three hundred dollars is the best ratio on the market. The Dobsonian mount has no motors, no alignment routine and nothing to fail: you point it at something and look. It collapses small enough to carry outside in one hand, which matters more than any optical number, because the telescope you leave in a closet shows you nothing.

The catch: It sits on a table, so you need a sturdy one. The collapsible tube lets stray light in and drifts out of collimation a little more often than a solid tube, and the helical focuser will not hold a heavy eyepiece or a camera.

Check price at High Point Scientific
If the budget stretches

Sky-Watcher Heritage 150P

$355
150mm (6 inch) tabletop Dobsonian, 750mm f/5

Fifty dollars more than the 130P for a real jump in light grasp. Buy this one if the budget stretches.

Same design, same simplicity, one size up. Six inches of aperture is where globular clusters start resolving into individual stars and the brighter galaxies stop being smudges. If you can afford it and you have a table to put it on, there is little reason to buy the 130P instead.

The catch: Bigger and heavier than the 130P, and it shares the same open-tube and focuser compromises.

Check price at High Point Scientific
If you want a tripod, not a table

Celestron Inspire 100AZ

$330
100mm refractor, altazimuth mount, full tripod included

The pick if you want something free-standing rather than something that needs a table.

A refractor needs no collimation and holds its alignment essentially forever, which suits people who want to set up and look rather than maintain equipment. It comes on its own tripod, so there is no hunting for a surface at the right height, and the smartphone adapter built into the lens cap is more useful than it sounds for Moon photos.

The catch: 100mm collects less light than the 130mm Dobsonian at a similar price, and refractors of this class show some colour fringing on bright targets like the Moon and Jupiter.

Check price at High Point Scientific
If you would rather look than search

Sky-Watcher Virtuoso GTi 150P

$545
150mm tabletop Dobsonian with GoTo tracking, driven from a phone

The Heritage 150P with motors, for people who would rather look than search.

Finding faint objects by star-hopping is a skill, and it is one some people enjoy building and others find infuriating. This is the same six-inch optical tube on a motorised mount you drive from your phone. It also tracks, so an object stays in the eyepiece while you fetch someone to come and look, which is the single biggest difference when you are showing the sky to other people.

The catch: Motors mean batteries and an alignment routine, and it costs a hundred and ninety dollars more than the manual version of the same telescope.

Check price at High Point Scientific
The one people wish they had bought first

Apertura AD8

$700
203mm (8 inch) Dobsonian, 1200mm f/5.9

The scope people wish they had bought first. Worth saving for.

Eight inches is where the hobby opens up: the Orion Nebula gets structure, the Cassini division in Saturn's rings is obvious on a steady night, and dozens of galaxies become real objects rather than rumours. It ships with a decent finder, two eyepieces, a laser collimator and a cooling fan, which is most of what you would otherwise buy separately in the first year.

The catch: It is a large object. The tube is around four feet long and the whole thing is roughly fifty pounds in two pieces. If you live up three flights of stairs, buy a Heritage and be honest with yourself.

Check price at High Point Scientific

What to expect on the first night

The Moon will be astonishing. It is bright, it is close, and craters along the terminator have shadows that look three dimensional. Jupiter will show as a small disc with two dark cloud belts and four moons in a line. Saturn's rings will be unmistakable but small. Everything else, at first, will look like a faint grey smudge, and learning to see detail in those smudges is a skill that takes months rather than minutes. People who expect Hubble images on night one sell their telescope in the spring.

The accessories worth buying, in order

A red headlamp comes first, because white light destroys twenty minutes of dark adaptation in one second. A planisphere comes second, because knowing where to point is worth more than optics. A single good wide-field eyepiece in the 24mm to 32mm range comes third. A Barlow lens, filters and anything described as a "kit" can wait until you know what you are missing.

What not to buy

Anything sold in a department store with a plastic tripod and a magnification figure on the box. Any telescope under about 70mm of aperture on an equatorial mount, where the mount costs more than the optics and does nothing useful for a beginner. Any "computerised" scope under $300, where the money goes into motors instead of glass. And any telescope bought for a child who has not yet asked for one twice.

We do not currently earn anything from these links. Nobody pays to appear here. How we pick gear.