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Best Kid-Friendly Telescopes I’d Recommend
Ratings & recommendations last updated by Zane Landers on
Reasons for and against choosing a tabletop dobsonian:
Tabletop Dobsonian reflectors offer the best optical performance for the price, allowing us to see more celestial objects compared to refractors or other types of telescopes.
They are very portable and are ready to use right out of the box.
The tabletop mount (the base of the scope) is more stable while viewing than tripods used with refractors.
Kids aren’t as picky about things like chromatic aberration, so a short refractor, which I wouldn’t recommend for an adult, will be fine for a child.
Refractors also allow children to view land objects during the day, while tabletop Dobsonians (a type of reflector telescope) produce upside-down images for terrestrial viewing, making them less suitable.
Refractors are more capable of withstanding rough handling by kids than reflectors, and unlike reflectors, they don't need an optics alignment procedure called collimation before use.
If you are curious about how I picked which made it to my elite kids’ best telescope list, let me first discuss the differentiators one by one below.
Age: Why I'd limit this guide for children aged 5 to 11?
If you've got a very small kid, say under the age of 5, I don't recommend a telescope at all
A young child under 5 is simply not going to be able to grasp the complicated concepts behind viewing anything besides the Moon and I don't foresee them using the telescope at all on their own. In such cases, adult guidance would be required from time to time especially since telescopes require a bit of knowledge and maintenance (storage, cleaning, collimation e.t.c.). Furthermore, there’s a high risk of them being unable to understand the danger of viewing the Sun with a telescope and blinding themselves.
If you have an older child (11+), or if a younger child is using the telescope only with your help, most of the restrictions for kids begin to fade away.
If you have an older child or intend to always use the telescope along with your child, it may be worth reading our regular guide for purchasing telescopes. Over the age of ten or eleven, I think you might be better off picking a full-fledged, adult-sized telescope for your child to use.
Budget: I recommend at least $150, but don't go overboard
For a real starter-quality telescope, I advise spending at least $150, though there are some kid-friendly, passable telescopes under that price. If you buy them a cheap junk telescope, you risk killing their enthusiasm for astronomy and permanently turning them away from it.
But, let’s face it. Are we sure kids have that long attention span that we expect them to go gaga over it for a long period of time? That’s next to impossible. Kids’ interests shift as quickly and as often as they switch channels from Disney Channel to Nickelodeon. So, it would be impractical to buy them something expensive that we expect to be in the storage room in a few weeks or even days. Unless you, an adult, can use it yourself, I guess you'd prefer to be called frugal rather than spend on something that won’t be used after the first few tries.
Portability and Appropriateness Factors To Consider
Kids would likely enjoy any gadget as long as they can carry them around, or at least they can move it from one place to another by themselves.
But still, you cannot expect every kid to have the same level of interest and attention. Mostly, the simpler the setup, the more kids would likely give it more time. We should also ensure that the telescope’s features can be appreciated by kids so that they’ll likely enjoy it for a long period of time.
Major Criteria: Is Your Kid Really Interested?
Telescopes are not for everybody. How to know whether your kids like telescopes?
Test the waters first. It’s easy to gauge children’s interests if they talk about it all the time, if they ask questions, or when they directly ask you to buy them one.
That being said, before you buy your kids a telescope, make sure they are really interested. Don’t just assume that because you love the hobby, others do as well. This costly assumption will just potentially add junk to your attic. Trust me! No matter how other people tell you that fruits don’t fall far from the tree, they sometimes do!
All Recommendable Tabletop Dobsonian Reflector Telescopes For Kids
Telescopes in the order are Celestron 76mm FirstScope, 130mm Sky-Watcher Heritage 130P, Celestron 130mm StarSense Explorer, and SkyWatcher Virtuoso GTi 150P computerized.
With 76mm (3") Aperture
With a 3" aperture, your child can expect to see a fair amount of detail on the Moon, Saturn’s rings, Saturn’s moon Titan, Jupiter’s moons, Venus’ phases, and maybe some detail on Mars and Jupiter if they're lucky, but that’s about it as far as the Solar System goes. You’ll be able to identify Uranus and Neptune as star-like points and nothing more. Deep-sky-wise, the Pleiades and a few open clusters are nice, and you can see the Orion Nebula. But that’s really the limit.
Celestron FirstScope is something I have highly mixed feelings about. The astronomy community usually considers FirstScope and its variants to be “toy telescopes.” But it’s one of the only few working telescopes for sale under $100 in the US that doesn’t have a shaky mount. If something happens to it, it's not too expensive of a loss—which might be good if you have particularly young children.
It has many, many issues befalling it, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering the price. For one, the primary mirror is spherical and thus it fails to deliver sharp images at “high” (really over maybe 40x) magnification. The eyepieces are… horrific. The 20mm Huygens (15x) works, but that’s about all I have to say about it. The 4mm Ramsden is literally useless and tends to get stuck in the focuser. But, still, its views of the Moon, planets, and a few select bright deep-sky objects will blow kids away if they're patient. That being said, the FirstScope will be crushed by a serious instrument of almost any aperture, even one slightly bigger at 100mm.
If you really must get a telescope for your child for around $70, the FirstScope or one of its 76mm clones will do it. But if you really want to give them a satisfactory experience, I’d suggest doubling or even tripling your budget.
With 114mm (4.5") Aperture
4.5” aperture allows one to see quite a handful of nebulae, galaxies, and globular clusters, the latter of which can even begin to be resolved into grainy stellar masses. In the Solar System, a 114mm reflector shows the phases of Mercury and Venus, Mars’ ice cap and a few dark markings at opposition, Jupiter’s cloud belts and Great Red Spot, the 4 Galilean moons circling Jupiter, Saturn’s rings and the division within them, Titan and a few other Saturnian moons, and Uranus and Neptune as tiny teal- and azure-colored disks.
The Z114's views are a lot bigger, sharper, and brighter compared to the FunScope. It was once unmatched in value and convenience—until Celestron decided to discontinue the Zhumell brand. Now, the only version available is the Library Edition from High Point Scientific, priced at $310, which is also the starting price for 5″ aperture tabletop Dobsonians.
Essentially a Zhumell Z114 with the 'StarSense Explorer' phone dock added to the optical tube, the Celestron StarSense Explorer 114mm Dobsonian includes the same eyepieces as the classic Z114 and is optically as capable as the Z114. What I don't like is that it is a pricier pick. That being said, it's true that the StarSense Explorer technology is extremely helpful in locating targets in the night sky with the help of your smartphone, especially for tech-savvy children who might be comfortable with using the Celestron's StarSense smartphone app.
With 130mm (5") Aperture
A 5” telescope gives you more than double the gain in light-collecting power over a 4.5” and is still extremely portable and easy to set up. In the last few years, the market dynamics have shifted so much that the even the best 5″ tabletop Dobsonian is now priced lower than all of the 4.5″ models available.
The Heritage 130P's collapsible tube feature does create the disadvantage of stray light being able to easily enter the tube, which can be (mostly) remedied by creating a foam shroud. However, we believe that the compactness and light weight are more than worth this minor inconvenience.
The Celestron StarSense Explorer 130mm Dobsonian has a closed tube design, but with exact same optics as the Heritage 130P. The major difference is the inclusion of Celestron’s StarSense Explorer technology, which can help the kid locate objects using a smartphone. However, at the price Celestron is asking, I don't usually recommend it over the Heritage 130P, even for adults.
With 150mm (6") Aperture
The 150mm (6") aperture means it has 44% more light-gathering ability than a 4” scope, and 1.2 times the resolution. When Mars is close to Earth, up to a dozen dark markings may be seen on the Martian surface – as opposed to maybe two or three with a 4” or 4.5”. Jupiter’s moons are disks instead of pinpoints; a smaller telescope lacks the resolution to perceive this. Saturn’s cloud belts are visible, as are several moons such as Rhea and Titan. Uranus and Neptune are obviously disks, and Neptune’s moon Triton may be seen. A 6” will also show many galaxies (some even with detail instead of as mere smudges), can begin to resolve some of the bright globular clusters into stars, and many open clusters are visible. The Orion Nebula is truly spectacular on a winter night.
If you’re looking for a serious telescope that you (or your child) won’t grow out of, this is it. It’s also made to a higher standard of optical quality, boosting the performance even further. The Heritage 150P does require a table, but as said before, a stable table or other surface is far better than a shaky and wobbly tripod that makes aiming the telescope frustrating. The whole telescope can still be picked up by an older kid with one hand (weighs 23.5 lbs) and fit in a duffel bag or suitcase. The collapsible tube means it can be stored virtually anywhere when not in use.
Recommendable Refractor Telescopes Below $350 For Kids
Cheap refractor models come with lower-quality accessories, mounts, and overall build, so I can’t confidently recommend any refractor telescopes for kids under $200, even though many options are available.
The StarSense Explorer LT 80AZ, though I’m recommending it, is still a mediocre 80mm doublet refractor and is one of the cheapest refractor telescopes that barely (and only partially) passes my filter. As a f/6.5 focal ratio refractor, it will have some chromatic aberration, though not severe. Thanks to being a refractor, the scope doesn’t require collimation like a tabletop dobsonian reflector and can be used for terrestrial viewing thanks to its upright image—in fact, it includes an Amici diagonal, so images aren’t reversed left to right. It’s very easy to aim, thanks to Celestron’s unique StarSense Explorer technology, which uses only a smartphone app and a special phone-mounting adapter to assist us in pointing the telescope at faint deep-sky objects without any additional hardware, alignment, or power.
We’d still recommend you to check out our Telescope Rankings page to make sure that you aren’t missing anything. We have more than 200 telescopes listed there.
