Observing
A dark sky shows several times what a suburban one does, and an hour of driving is wasted by one missing item. This list is ordered by how badly the evening goes without each thing.
A red torch with a genuinely low minimum. Dark adaptation is what a dark site is for, and a white phone screen undoes twenty minutes of it in one glance.
Transport is what knocks a telescope out of alignment. A padded case sized for the tube is the difference between setting up and re-collimating.
The gain from a seat is largest exactly where the sky is darkest, because the faintest detail is the detail that needs a still head to be held at all.
A dew shield or a heater keeps the session going past midnight. A paper chart works when the phone is cold and flat, which at a dark site in winter it will be.
White, blue, green and red · 900 lumens · zoom focus
A four-colour LED torch with a zoom head and a stated 900 lumens, whose red mode is one of four rather than its purpose.
Best for: A general outdoor torch whose red mode will do at a pinch
≈ £17 / €20
12 cm internal depth · 1 × 1 cm cube foam · takes 2 in eyepieces standing
An aluminium case with 12 cm of internal depth and 1 cm cube foam, deep enough for large 2 in eyepieces to stand upright.
Best for: A growing eyepiece and filter collection that has outgrown its boxes
≈ £76 / €70
Polypropylene · carry strap · no figures published
A polypropylene telescoping stool with a carry strap, described in five bullets that contain no measurement at all.
Best for: Nobody who has not seen one in person or measured what they need
≈ €20
Book with a rotating star chart · from age 8
An illustrated guide to the night sky for readers from eight, supplied with a rotating star chart for identifying constellations.
Best for: A child from eight who has just been given a telescope or binoculars
≈ £12 / €15
Tube outside diameter 148–167 mm · 200 mm tall · 580 mm long
A flexible black ABS dew shield with a velvet lining and a foam contact strip, for tube outside diameters of 148 to 167 mm.
Best for: A 150 mm reflector or a Schmidt-Cassegrain whose front diameter has been measured
≈ $36 / £44
Enough that the Milky Way casts a visible structure rather than being a faint band. In practical terms it is the difference between seeing a galaxy as a smudge and seeing its shape.
A spare battery, a warm layer, and the counterweight. All three end a session, and only one of them can be improvised.
It decides whether the telescope arrives aligned. A tube that rolls loose in a boot arrives out of collimation, which is twenty minutes of the dark sky spent indoors on a torch.
Any figure written into the body of this page was true on the day it was written. The amount shown next to each instrument is requested from the retailer as the page loads, and it is that amount, not the text, that stands.
Telescopes and mounts are discounted over and over through the year — hardest of all in the weeks before Christmas, which is exactly when most of them are bought — and a struck-through figure on its own says nothing whatever about what the same model was charged at four weeks ago. UniverTrack keeps a week-by-week record for each retailer, so a discount is measured against a figure somebody genuinely paid instead of one invented for the sale — and it says when the moment to buy has genuinely arrived.
