Under $20
A planisphere for your latitude
$15
Rotating star wheel, no batteries
The cheapest thing on this page and the one most likely to still be in use in ten years.
Dial in the date and time and it shows what is above you. No battery, no signal, no screen destroying your night vision. Apps do the same job with more precision and less understanding: a planisphere teaches you how the sky moves, because you can watch a whole year turn under your thumb.
The catch: Buy the one matched to your latitude band. A planisphere for the wrong hemisphere is a coaster.
The one they do not know they need
Red-only or dedicated red mode, hands free
Twenty-five dollars that makes every other piece of equipment work better.
Dark adaptation takes twenty to thirty minutes to build and about one second of white light to destroy. A red headlamp lets you read a chart, change an eyepiece and find your coffee without starting over. Everyone who observes seriously owns one, and most beginners do not know they need it.
The catch: Get one where red is a separate mode rather than one you cycle to through white.
Under $50, and the best of the lot
Celestron Cometron 7x50
$45
7x magnification, 50mm objectives, 774g, handheld
The best first purchase in astronomy, and it is not close.
Seven power is low enough to hold steady for a whole evening and wide enough that you can actually find what you are looking for, which is the part beginners underestimate. Fifty millimetre objectives show craters along the lunar terminator, the four Galilean moons of Jupiter strung out in a line, the Pleiades filling the view, and Andromeda as a real smudge of light. They cost less than a tank of petrol.
The catch: They will not show Saturn's rings as rings. Nothing at this magnification will.
For the one who owns all the gadgets
A Planetary Society membership
$50
Annual membership, quarterly magazine, member community
The gift for someone who already owns the gadgets.
It funds planetary defence work, advocacy and science, and the recipient gets a genuinely good quarterly magazine rather than a branded mug. For the person who has a telescope and does not need another accessory, this is the one that lands.
The catch: Not a physical object, which matters to some recipients on the day.
Sentimental and still accurate
A custom star chart for a specific date
$60
Accurate sky for a chosen date, time and place, printed or engraved
The sentimental gift that happens to be scientifically correct.
The sky over a particular place at a particular moment, rendered accurately: a birth, a wedding, the night someone moved somewhere new. It works because it is real data rather than a generic pattern of stars.
The catch: Quality varies enormously between sellers. Check that the chart actually changes when you change the date before you buy.
For the wall
Wall clock completing one rotation every 29.5 days
A gift that quietly teaches somebody the lunar cycle.
It turns once every synodic month, so over a few weeks the person living with it stops having to check what the Moon is doing and simply knows. That is a surprisingly pleasant thing to give someone.
The catch: Decorative rather than instrumental. Nobody plans an observing session around it.
An actual piece of another world
A meteorite pendant with provenance
$120
Cut and polished meteorite with a certificate naming the fall
A piece of another world, for roughly the price of ordinary jewellery.
Sericho and Muonionalusta are the two commonly available types. A cut section shows the Widmanstatten pattern, an interlocking crystal structure that only forms when metal cools over millions of years. It cannot be reproduced in a workshop, which is the whole appeal.
The catch: Only buy with a certificate from a dealer who names the fall. The market has plenty of slag sold as meteorite.