Our Portable Telescope Picks, Sorted By Price
The Sky-Watcher Heritage 100P is the cheapest telescope I can confidently recommend for beginners. It’s a small telescope, but it still packs an impressive 4” (100mm) of aperture. It features a parabolic primary mirror (though not subject to quite as rigorous quality control standards as higher-priced optics) with a 400mm focal length, enabling a vast field of view with wide-angle 1.25” eyepieces. If you’re a beginner to the hobby, the included pair of eyepieces and Barlow lens are more than enough to get started.
Portability: The optical tube is a mere 40 cm long, and the entire scope weighs a mere 2.81 kg. This telescope easily fits in a small rucksack or stows away in luggage, which makes it the best companion for travelling and camping.
The Sky-Watcher Heritage 130P packs a tonne of performance into a portable, inexpensive, and convenient package. I found the optical quality to be very good, and 130 mm of aperture means you get 69% brighter images than with a 100 mm dobsonian.
Portability: It has a special feature—its collapsable tube. The collapsable tube of the 130P shortens its length to a mere 37 cm—about half the length of a solid-tubed comparable 130 mm instrument. This makes the scope lighter and able to fit into a smaller space, such as a backpack, storage shelf, or carry case. The Heritage 130P weighs only 6 kg. 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.
The Heritage 150P is one of the largest tabletop Dobsonians available, and it borrows extensively from the above-listed smaller Heritage 130P. The same collapsable 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 rather than a table or stool, which simplifies finding somewhere to set it. A computerised version of the Heritage 150P is also available as the Virtuoso GTi 150P Dobsonian, which is listed below.
The Virtuoso 90 provides splendid views of the Moon, planets, and other bright, small targets like double stars thanks to its high-quality Maksutov-Cassegrain optics. The Virtuoso’s limited field of view and tiny aperture mean it’s only suitable for bright targets and simply won’t satisfy you on deep-sky objects. However, for a portable telescope to bring to family, friends, or astronomy outreach events to get people excited about the rings of Saturn, the Virtuoso 90 is an excellent choice. Its mount isn’t capable of full GoTo without the addition of more hardware, but after being levelled and pointed north, it automatically tracks, which is more than adequate at this aperture.
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 motorised 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 Sky-Watcher SkyMax-127 Virtuoso GTi 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 feature-rich Virtuoso GTi mount is a GoTo mount that can be 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 computerised mount thanks to the advanced encoders. You’re able to use the Virtuoso GTi both as a tabletop mount or atop a compatible ⅜” tripod stud.
Sky-Watcher SkyMax-127 AZ GTi
The 127mm SkyMax AZ GTi kit shares the optics, accessories, and design features of the above-listed SkyMax 127 Virtuoso GTi but utilises the tripod-style AZ-GTi mount instead. Like the Virtuoso GTi, you get the benefits of WiFi-operated GoTo, the FreedomFind encoders, and automatic tracking once the mount is aligned on the sky. While the tripod doesn’t fit in a backpack, the telescope’s lightweight optical tube and computerised mount head easily fit in a backpack or small carry case.
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 with similar light-gathering ability to the Skymax 127. 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.
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.
Being a Schmidt-Cassegrain, the 6SE is incredibly compact, with the optical tube only 40.6 cm long and weighing 4.53 kg. The entire telescope, with the tripod, weighs only 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.