While refractors use lenses, and reflectors make use of mirrors, to create and magnify an image, the catadioptric makes use of both lenses and mirrors for high-definition and superior views. During your observations, light from your chosen target passes through to a lens, which corrects or reduces aberration that distorts the view that is later taken in through the eyepiece. Curved primary mirrors then reflect this light onto a secondary mirror, which then reaches your eyes. You will find two kinds of Catadioptric telescopes — the Schmidt-Cassegrain and the Maksutov-Cassegrain. Once you've set up and aligned the telescope, you can use the handheld controller to aim it at various celestial objects in the extensive database, such as planets, galaxies, double stars, star clusters and nebulas. For beginners (or those who can't decide what to observe first!), there's a 'sky tour' option that automatically guides the telescope to a range of different fascinating cosmic objects. It offers impressive magnification of up to 133x, allowing you to view celestial objects with incredible detail. The included eyepieces are well-suited for observing the moon and planets, revealing beautiful finer details that you don't get with many other scopes. It's sturdy and user-friendly, making it a great choice even for those new to astronomy or don't have much experience. While there are cheaper alternatives available, they often don't match the quality of the Skyline 6-inch. You can create a “sky tour” of all the best celestial bodies, based on your exact time and location Whether you're keen on stargazing and astrophotography using your smartphone or camera, planning to explore dark sky areas with a compact and portable telescope or wanting to dive deep into astronomy with a large Dobsonian model, we've got you covered no matter what.

It's designed to be portable and lightweight, allowing for stress-free transportation and setup. It also comes equipped with the SkyPortal app, which seamlessly locates and identifies over a whopping 100,000 celestial objects for you to explore. While it's good for all skill levels, beginners will appreciate the built-in tour mode, which helps you find various celestial objects in the sky or within specific constellations. This is especially helpful if you have limited knowledge of the sky and aren't sure what to look for, and you just want the telescope to show you some interesting objects. If the notion of peering into an eyepiece to look at stars seems quaintly old-fashioned to you, Unistellar's eVscope eQuinox could be the telescope you're looking for (as long as you have a suitably enormous budget). There's no eyepiece; it connects wirelessly to your phone or tablet via an app and enables you to see the heavens directly on your screen, complete with built-in image processing so that you get a much clearer picture than you would by looking directly into an eyepiece. Why do you care what the seeing conditions are like? As long as it’s not totally cloudy, snowing, or raining, so what, right? Of the 8 products, we discovered that 6 were more expensive and 1 were cheaper than Star Finding Telescope. Prices fromGoTo or computerised telescopes are the new generation of stargazing, and if you are into your gadgetry then you will definitely want to get one! The best one we have found is the Orion 27191 Starblast IntelliScope Reflector. Although it uses manual controls rather than computerised spotting, this does not detract from the overall performance. It is compact and light, making it a great choice to take out and about on stargazing trips, or even just a camping stay where you want to get some great shots of the night sky. What I like about it: Choose the lowest magnification eyepiece you have available and put it in your focuser (if you have a Newtonian reflector) or diagonal (if you have a refractor, Schmidt-Cassegrain, Maksutov-Cassegrain, or other catadioptric style telescope). Refractors work by bending — or refracting — the light they gather to give you a view of your astronomical target. Easy to set up, the refractor is best suited to planetary and lunar viewing, using lenses to collect and focus light to form an image, while an eyepiece magnifies the view. Overall, we think the Celestron Astro Fi 102 offers excellent value for beginners who are eager to begin their journey into stargazing. It's lightweight, portable, user-friendly and delivers good optical performance that is sure to satisfy. Editor’s Note: This post highlights data from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process.

Unistellar eQuinox 2:An easy-to-use motorized smart telescope that can locate night sky objects with the press of a button, the eQuinox 2 can have you exploring the stars in minutes with no prior knowledge, although, its in-built camera isn't quite detailed enough.★★★★½

What's A Barlow Lens

The fact that TESS is scanning broad swaths of the sky and recording brightness variations of all nearby stars within makes it extremely useful to assess how the habitability of planets around red dwarf stars is affected by flaring, wherein those stars unleash waves of ultraviolet and X-ray radiation harmful to life as we know it. And they do so more frequently than our Sun. If our star can strip off Mars’ water and dense atmosphere from a huge distance, habitable zone planets around furiously flaring red dwarfs lying about 30 times closer could lose their atmospheres in just a hundred million years. The intense radiation could prevent life from even arising on such planets. However, initial TESS observations have provided some hope.