All The Good Portable Telescopes Available in the US, Sorted by Price
Even the best telescopes below $100-$150 are limited by their small aperture. Additionally, upgrading to nicer accessories with any of those scopes places you in a higher price bracket where there are better options. As such, it’s worth considering binoculars and saving your money for a bigger scope if this is all you have to spend right now.
List Price: $159
In addition to being the cheapest and most compact telescope on this list, the Zhumell Z100 tabletop dobsonian also offers us an extremely wide field of view, rivaled only by binoculars.The downside I find concerning though is that the primary mirror cannot be collimated without making some modifications. This means that you must treat it with care during transport, as the primary mirror being knocked out of alignment will prevent you from seeing anything usable. The scope will probably arrive at your doorstep with an at least slightly misaligned primary mirror anyway, so it’s really restricted to low-power use (below 60x magnification).
Its optical tube is mere 16” long and the entire scope weighs a mere 6.2 pounds (2.81 kg), making it easy for it to fit into my backpack or stow away in luggage. I like that the Z100’s base has a nice built-in carrying handle as well.
List Price: $159
It won’t win any prizes for stunning deep-sky vistas if it competes with the Zhumell Z100 due to its lesser field of view, but the Mak60 and Dobsonian mount package provide an even more tremendously portable scope with even sharper views of the Moon, planets, and double stars than the Z100. It has a reasonably useful set of included accessories and a steady, easy-to-aim mount.
List Price: $239
The Zhumell Z114 is one of the top telescopes I recommend for beginners. It’s a great travel scope as well, thanks to its simplicity, lightweight design, and portability. It is essentially a slightly enlarged Zhumell Z100 with 25% more light-gathering ability and higher-quality optics (along with the ability to collimate them).
It was a bit tough for me to fit the assembled Z114 in a backpack but it can be done; a suitcase is no problem. However, I often have to slide back its optical tube in the tube cradle to minimize its physical dimensions. The Z114 weighs 11 lbs (5 kg).
List Price: $199
A scaled-up version of the nifty SarBlue Mak60, the SarBlue Mak70 comes with a decent alt-azimuth mount and tripod and an acceptable, if basic, set of accessories. It also has razor-sharp optics, as we expect with any Maksutov-Cassegrain type of telescope. However, like the Mak60, you don’t get a lot of aperture for your money, and this scope is only good for the Moon, planets, and double stars; not deep sky objects. The Maksutov optical tube can fit almost any backpack. The tripod, also, is very portable and can fit a standard carry-on bag.
List Price: $275
The Sky-Watcher Heritage 130P packs a ton of performance into a portable, inexpensive, and convenient package. I found the optical quality to be very good, and 130mm of aperture means you get 30% brighter images than with a 114mm dobsonian telescope and 69% brighter than with a 100mm dobsonian. The Heritage 130P weighs only 14 lbs (6 kg)—a bit more than the Zhumell Z114.
It has a special feature—its collapsible tube. The collapsible tube of the 130P shortens its length to a mere 14.5” (37 cm)—about half the length of a solid-tubed comparable 130mm instrument such as the next mentioned Zhumell Z130. This makes the scope lighter and able to fit into a smaller space, such as a backpack, storage shelf, or carry case. The only downside is that you will need to make a removable shroud of some sort to wrap around the struts and shield the telescope’s optics from stray light, dew, or curious hands.
List Price: $349
The Z130 is comparable to the Sky-Watcher Heritage 130P apart from the Z130’s superior focuser and closed-tube design. The 21-pound (9.52 kg) weight combined with the larger physical size means that the Z130 is getting a little too big for backpacks and needs a very sturdy table to accommodate it. At nearly 25 inches in length, the Zhumell Z130 can be a challenge to fit in a carry-on bag as well, as most have a 22-inch length limit. It would also be quite hefty for a 10-year-old to carry it alone in a single piece without an adult’s help. If portability is your primary concern, you’re better off with Heritage 130P due to the reduced dimensions of 130P.
The Heritage 150P is one of the largest tabletop Dobsonians available, and it borrows extensively from the smaller Heritage 130P. The same collapsible tube keeps the scope fairly compact, though the width of the 150P’s base means it can be a bit more difficult to find a way to transport it on a plane, for instance. However, it’s still very portable and lightweight. The longer 750mm focal length of the Heritage 150P and its fairly tall, sturdy base mean that you can get away with elevating the 150P on something like a milk crate or even a storage container as opposed to a table or stool, which simplifies finding somewhere to set it.
The Virtuoso GTi 130P adds even more bonus features to the already-great Heritage 130P, and all at a great price. It is a fully computerized (the scope can automatically aim and track objects based on our instructions on a smartphone app) version of the earlier-mentioned Heritage 130P.
The Sky-Watcher Virtuoso GTi 150P uses the same optics and basic construction and is provided with the same eyepieces and accessories as the standard Heritage 150P. The Virtuoso GTi, however, adds fully motorized tracking and aiming capabilities, either using Sky-Watcher’s free SynScan smartphone app or a more sophisticated astronomy app like SkySafari. You can also push the scope manually with the GoTo system activated without impairing the GoTo alignment thanks to Sky-Watcher’s FreedomFind technology; this is not found on many other GoTo telescope mounts.
The Celestron Astro Fi 102 is a Maksutov-Cassegrain design, providing a long focal length in a compact tube with no collimation needed—ever—and usually delivering extremely sharp images. The Astro Fi 102 includes a fully motorized GoTo mount, which is set up and controlled via your phone or tablet. This is accomplished either with Celestron’s free SkyPortal app or the more advanced SkySafari Pro app, which gives you access to more targets and features. Unlike the Sky-Watcher computerized scope/mount offerings, however, you cannot use the Astro-Fi mount manually regardless of whether it is powered up. While the tripod doesn’t fit in a backpack, the telescope’s optical tube and computerized mount head easily fit in a backpack or small carry case.
Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 5” SCT
Using Celestron’s C5 SCT optical tube atop the StarSense Explorer mount, the StarSense Explorer DX 5” (127mm) gave us similar views as the Zhumell Z114. But it was slightly steadier and more compact thanks to the C5 optical tube’s Schmidt-Cassegrain design, and the mount is of course easy to use thanks to the StarSense Explorer technology. StarSense Explorer technology shows us where our telescope is pointed in the sky by making use of the camera and gyroscope of our smartphone attached to the mount, and then we have to physically move the telescope accordingly.
Sky-Watcher 127 mm Skymax AZ-GTi Mak GoTo
While not actually a 127mm aperture (Sky-Watcher and Celestron’s “127mm” Maksutovs are really stopped down internally to about 120mm in aperture), the 127mm Skymax is a bit more capable than the 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain models, and the AZ-GTi mount is packed with features. It’s a GoTo mount controlled with your phone or tablet, but as with Sky-Watcher’s other GTi mounts, you can move the scope manually with the mount powered on or off, with no effect on the alignment of the computerized mount thanks to the advanced encoders. You control the GTi mount either with the free SynScan app or a paid but more capable astronomy app like SkySafari Pro. For portability purposes, this scope significantly beats the next-ranked NexStar 5SE, though the 5SE is a better capable scope overall.
The NexStar 5SE is extremely portable and convenient but delivers enough aperture to keep you entertained, too. The Celestron NexStar 5SE is a 125mm (5”) Schmidt-Cassegrain; it’s similar in light gathering ability to the Skymax 127 or a 114mm tabletop dobsonian reflector. However, the scope boasts an impressively sturdy steel tripod, a solid GoTo mount, and it’s able to fit in a backpack or suitcase when disassembled. The only downsides are that the NexStar hand controller is a little primitive and difficult to use compared to an app-based mount. While you can do planetary astrophotography with the NexStar 5SE, its built-in wedge is useless for deep-sky astrophotography, and the scope is not designed to be used with either an f/6.3 focal reducer or the HyperStar f/2 system, which are compatible with all of Celestron’s Schmidt-Cassegrain optical tubes. Planetary images will also be a little less sharp compared to the 127mm SkyMax Maksutov or a larger telescope.
Unlike the smaller NexStar SE models and many of the other GoTo tripod-mounted instruments Celestron sells, the NexStar 6SE actually has enough aperture for the scope’s GoTo technology to be a useful utility rather than an inconvenient hindrance, and Celestron’s 6” SCTs seem to boast some of the best optics of their already high-quality SCTs, with StarBright XLT full multi-coatings and water-white corrector lens glass. The 6SE can accept many of the various SCT accessories that Celestron and Meade offer, including a 2” star diagonal, an f/6.3 focal reducer, a T-adapter, and more. You can also use the scope for deep-sky astrophotography with a focal reducer or Starizona HyperStar provided you switch the OTA onto an equatorial mount, and the stock mount works great for planetary or lunar astrophotography. Being a Schmidt-Cassegrain, the 6SE is incredibly compact, with the optical tube only 16” long and weighing 10 pounds/4.53 kg. The entire telescope, with the tripod, weighs only 28.8 pounds/13 kg. But such an expensive telescope can be a little scary to travel with due to the risk of theft or damage. Celestron sells a carrying case for use with the 6SE, which we would highly recommend buying if you plan on flying with it, or you can put something together yourself out of any good pluck-foam case. The tripod can be checked in luggage, and the scope and mount can be carried on in their case.