For you to fully trust us, you’d need to know how we make money and how that process affects our review stages and ratings. We make money through affiliate commission partnerships with telescope retailers such as High Point Scientific, AgenaAstro, Explore Scientific, and Orion’s Telescope.com, as well as from the e-commerce behemoth, Amazon. This decision was made to uphold our editorial policies so that we do not have to alter facts for financial gain. We have chosen to partner with these specific retailers because we believe they are the best options for our US audience when it comes to making a telescope purchase that they will not later regret. In the past, we’ve been approached by other online retailers, and we’ve turned down their pitches.

When you make a purchase from Amazon or any of our other affiliates after clicking on the respective affiliate link, we receive a small commission. Even though we receive a commission, clicking on our link has no effect on your end. Amazon and other e-commerce sites do not charge additional fees for paying commissions to us. Even if you purchase the same product without our referral link, there will be no price difference. It is therefore a win-win situation. If you rescind or request a refund for the ordered product, we will not receive the associated commission.

We never receive compensation for writing reviews, regardless of whether the review is positive or negative in nature; we never have and we never will.  Our recommendations vary based solely on the quality of the telescopes.

We adhere to a strict code of conduct when it comes to our content.

• We’re not going to sugarcoat it; we’re going to say exactly what we think about the scope.
• While reviewing, try to be as accurate and objective as possible.
• The scope would only be reviewed by experts with first-hand experience.
• We’ll never accept money to publish or update a review.
• Editorial writers are not part of our financial team, and they have no incentive to promote a company or product unless it is genuinely of high quality.

Being honest pays off in the long run

You might believe that the top-ranked telescope and the one we recommend are the ones from which we make the most money. To be honest, the telescope industry isn’t as lucrative as, say, the credit card or VPN market.

For almost all telescopes at these retailers that we recommend, we have a single percentage-based payment rate. So, we stand to gain nothing by recommending one scope over the other without a valid reason.

It makes perfect sense for us to recommend the exact equipment you want without regard for the financial aspect on our end, in order to gain a long-term readership and authority status in the telescope reviews niche.

We want you to be happy at the end of the whole process.

Why not just run ads?

Finding experts and assisting them in creating a content beast takes money and time. From a business standpoint, the money we could make from running ads alone would be insufficient. The running cost surpasses what we can earn from advertisements alone.

Why disclosing all this information?

Because we want you to believe us, we want to be as honest as possible. We want to be a reliable, thorough resource for the astronomy community, and we think that letting people know how we make money is a key part of that.