Beginner-Gear

The two most useful eyepieces you can own probably aren’t the two that came in the box, and choosing them takes two numbers, not brand loyalty. Your telescope most likely arrived with a 25mm and a 10mm eyepiece. This piece is about what those millimetres actually do, why the 10mm is so uncomfortable to look through, and which two eyepieces to add first so you cover the sky from wide star fields to the cloud belts on Jupiter. No “best eyepiece” ranking. Just the arithmetic, worked on the scopes beginners actually buy. ...

The ZWO Seestar S50 sat on my balcony railing in Nicosia for 47 sessions between November 2025 and April 2026. I pointed it at globulars, planetaries, galaxies, the Moon, and — twice — Jupiter. After six months I know exactly who should buy one and, more usefully, who should save the money for something else. The setup that kept me coming back The S50 weighs 1.5 kg. I carry it out with one hand, set it on the railing, open the app, and I’m imaging within three minutes. No polar alignment, no balance weights, no multi-star alignment routine. The internal plate solver — the same astrometry.net algorithm I wrote about last month — handles pointing. Tap an object, the telescope slews, stacking begins. ...

If you have €120–€180 and you’ve never owned an astronomy instrument, buy a pair of 10×50 binoculars. Don’t buy a telescope. I’ve watched too many friends spend €200 on a wobbly 70mm department-store refractor, see Saturn as a tiny pixel-blur once, and shelve the thing for good. There’s exactly one case where that advice flips, and I’ll get to it. But the default answer, for the person walking into this hobby with no gear and no specific target in mind, is binoculars. ...