Explainer · Buying Gear · Beginner
Your First Telescope
Aperture and mount type — what actually matters when choosing a telescope to observe the sky with your own eye, before a camera enters the picture at all.
28 August 2026 · 2 min read
Buying a telescope to look through with your own eye is a different question to buying one for photography, and this page only deals with the first of those — what to buy for visual astronomy, with nothing more complicated between you and the sky than an eyepiece.
Aperture, Not Magnification
Magnification is the number most telescope boxes shout about, and it's the wrong one to chase. Any scope can be pushed to an absurd magnification with a cheap eyepiece — you just end up with a bigger, dimmer, blurrier smudge. What actually matters is aperture: the diameter of the main mirror or lens. A bigger aperture gathers more light and resolves finer detail, and it's really the only number that predicts what you'll be able to see, whether that's the cloud bands on Jupiter or the faint smudge of a distant galaxy.
Dobsonians and GoTo Mounts
A Dobsonian is about the simplest telescope design there is: a tube sat on a swivelling base, with no motors and nothing to charge. It gets you more aperture per pound than any other design, but you point it by hand and learn to star-hop your way to targets — some people find that the fun part, others find it frustrating. A GoTo or plate-solving mount, like the StarSense below, costs more for the same aperture, but it finds things for you, which is worth paying for if hunting down faint fuzzies by hand isn't how you want to spend night one.
By Price
These are rough UK price bands, not a hard line to stick to.
Under £150 — phone and tripod territory
Enough to try visual astronomy before spending real money — decent Moon and planet views, nothing more yet.
Celestron Cometron FirstScope 76mm Tabletop Dobsonian
Cheap enough to treat as disposable if it turns out astronomy isn't for you — decent views of the Moon and bright planets, small enough to grab on a whim.
Prefer used? Worth checking Facebook Marketplace or eBay too — always worth comparing before buying new.
£150–£400 — first real beginner scope
This is where a real beginner telescope starts — proper aperture, real deep-sky views once your eyes adjust, whether you go fully manual or let your phone do the pointing.
Sky-Watcher Heritage 150P Tabletop FlexTube Dobsonian
The 130P isn't in stock on Amazon right now, so this is its slightly bigger 150mm sibling in the same tabletop FlexTube family. Fully manual — no computer, no batteries — so you actually learn to star-hop and find things yourself.
Celestron StarSense Explorer LT 114AZ
Your phone docks into the mount and plate-solves the sky in real time, then walks you to targets with on-screen arrows — a good middle ground if star-hopping by hand feels like too much at first.
Prefer used? Worth checking Facebook Marketplace or eBay too — always worth comparing before buying new.
Once you're comfortable finding your way around the sky by eye, the natural next step is pointing a camera through it — see Turning Your Telescope Into an Astrophotography Rig for what that takes.