7 best telescopes for exploring the night sky

Best: For effortless astronomy

With this scope, all you have to do is choose what you want to look at via the app and watch the image build on your phone’s screen, which is both exciting and rewarding.

Obviously, the first thing that you’ll notice about the Stellina is that it’s no ordinary telescope and actually looks like it wouldn’t be out of place on the set of a sci-fi movie. At the touch of a button, the modernist black and white housing beautifully reveals the refractor telescope.

It also allows you to share the discoveries and experience with a multi-user mode that allows up to 10 mobile devices to connect to the scope. Through the app, you’ll be able to zero in on over 100 deep-sky targets, as well as get a good look at the lunar surface. 

The Stellina is fully computerised to take the headache and guesswork out of astronomy and with a quick pairing to your smartphone, you’ll be up and running in minutes. Using the phone’s GPS signal to geolocate, all the pointing and tracking is completely automated, as is the focus, giving the most user-friendly experience of all the scopes on test. 

Best: For guided tours of the stars

This excellent refractor model makes great use of a phone dock on top of the scope, transforming it into one that can pinpoint all kinds of targets, using any phone installed with the StarSense app.

Aligning the phone with the telescope is a simple affair. Once your phone is locked on, the app will guide you to different targets via on-screen arrows. It really is a very intuitive system and takes no time at all to master.

The app circles interesting targets and even gives you a “Tonight’s Best” option too, to pique your interest and keep you coming back to the scope night after night. The fact that it’s a refractor also means that it’s lightweight and easy to take and set up at dark sky sites, especially if you struggle with light pollution. The scope has good quality optics made for sharp views of the lunar surface, as well as wider views of star clusters.

Best: For budding astronomers

Good build quality and an effortless set up meant that it took no time at all before we were being treated to excellent early evening views of Mercury. The larger refractor (100mm+) housed within the 100AZ also means you can really explore and investigate hundreds of deep-sky objects, like galaxies and nebulae. This telescope brings the moon closer, with good crater definition and more details of the lunar surface, especially when using the 20mm eyepiece for some extra magnification. Take the dust cap off and you will see that it doubles as a smartphone holder, allowing you to attach it to the eye piece, which then collects the light captured by the scope and projects it into the phone’s camera. 

A single image is then built up from lots of video captures and this really worked well and gave impressive results of solar system objects, even when conditions were far from perfect. Tripod and mount were solid, with a handle that made the 100AZ easy to track around the sky under full control.

Best: For deep sky gazing

Although it may look a little cumbersome, this reflector was surprisingly lightweight and easy to move around. The equatorial mount that the telescope stands on is well-engineered and even though it looks daunting to set up, the mount wasn’t difficult to construct and allowed for smooth tracking. The scope is supplied with two eyepieces, 25mm and 10mm, which means that you can dial up the magnification when needed, which allowed us sharp, clear views of the lunar surface as well as the ability to study a number of planets and explore some of the brighter galaxies waiting in the deep sky.

Best: For moon watching

This is a great scope for any one who wants to move on from a basic model, but doesn’t want the hassle of setting up complex mounts. The 100P is known as a Dobsonian because it’s mounted on a revolving base that just sits on the floor, or on a tabletop, and can be angled up or down to find your chosen target. 

It’s also compact and very lightweight, which means that it’s a good grab-and-go scope for any one who wants to escape light polluted areas and explore the heavens from dark-sky sites.

The mount moved easily and was effortless to use and the extra magnification from the 25mm and 10mm eyepieces delivered good views of solar system planets and there was some extraordinary detail when we trained it on the lunar surface.

Best: All rounder  

One of the big advantages of an equatorial mount is that is allows you to enjoy longer sessions of stargazing because you can progressively track stars as they move across the night sky. The NexStar+ handset that moves the mount of the Celestron was easy to understand and a joy to use.

The telescope’s quality optics and excellent magnification meant that we could study a range of deep sky objects as well as a broad range of solar system points of interest. When moving closer to home, we enjoyed some astonishing views of a super moon.

This is a tool for any one who is starting to get serious about their stargazing and the NexStar+ handset meant that we could enjoy any one of the 40,000 objects that are currently dialled into its database.

It’s even possible to go portable, as it’s surprisingly compact and lightweight for such a powerful telescope.

Best: For urban astronomers

This reflector scope packs a lot of tech into a relatively small space to deliver some eye-popping results when you look through the viewfinder. That’s because the eVscope system builds up a live colour image of whatever you’re looking at in the eyepiece.

The eVscope is app-enabled and controlled, so once you connect your wifi and the telescope has done all the hard work for you by comparing the star field to a database of star positions, you’re ready to go exploring via the app.

Planetary detail was good, as was the view of extended deep-sky objects and interstellar nebulae, but we were also treated to astonishing lunar views, which were impressively sharp. Available to pre-order now.