Sir Patrick Moore has always recommended a good pair of 50mm binoculars as an excellent introduction to the night sky. Binoculars allow the sweeping deep-sky vistas beyond the reach of higher-magnification telescopes. Below a certain price point more can often be learned with such binoculars than a very small telescope - and binoculars have many general purpose uses too.

 50mm diameter lenses are considered optimum for astronomy - any smaller, and they will not gather enough light to show many objects. Much bigger than 50mm and the binoculars will be too heavy to hand-hold and the addition of a tripod will push the price above that of a sensible telescope.

The same is true of magnification - the higher the magnification, the harder it is to hand-hold binoculars. 10x magnification is often considered to be the limit but this does vary with the individual. Binoculars with higher magnifications are featured here but to see for example the rings of Saturn or a disk on Mars, a telescope is the way to go.

For binoculars of 60mm or above please see our 'Observation Binoculars' section.