Best Beginner Telescopes Under $100 in 2026 (An Honest Guide)

Can you buy a real telescope for under $100 in 2026? Yes — but the honest answer comes with an asterisk, and this guide won’t hide it from you.

This category has changed dramatically since we first wrote this article. Orion and Meade — the brands behind four of our previous seven picks — went out of business in July 2024. The Zhumell Z100, another budget favorite, was quietly discontinued. And several scopes that used to cost $99 now sell for twice that.

What’s left is a much shorter list: a handful of genuine survivors worth your money, and a sea of no-name junk that will kill a beginner’s interest in astronomy faster than a cloudy month. We rebuilt this guide from scratch to separate the two.

Our Top 4 Beginner Telescopes Under $100 in 2026

1. Celestron FirstScope 76 — Best Overall Under $100
2. Celestron Travel Scope 70 — Best Refractor Kit
3. Gskyer 70mm AZ — Most Complete Beginner Bundle
4. Svbony SV501P — Best Ultra-Budget Travel Scope

Celestron FirstScope 76 – Best Overall Telescope Under $100

The FirstScope has outlived nearly every competitor in this price bracket, and there’s a reason: at around $60-75 it’s a real telescope, not a toy. A 76mm reflector on a wonderfully simple tabletop Dobsonian mount — set it on a table, point, look. The whole thing weighs 4.3 lbs and stands about 13 inches tall, so a child can carry it in one hand.

Optically, expectations need to be honest. The 300mm f/4 tube uses a spherical mirror that can’t be collimated, which means images get mushy above roughly 40x magnification. Of the two included eyepieces — a 20mm (15x) and a 4mm (75x) — the 20mm is the one you’ll actually use; the 4mm pushes past what the optics can deliver.

What Can You See?

The Moon is the star of the show — craters and maria look genuinely pleasing at low power. You’ll spot Jupiter’s four bright moons, Saturn’s rings as tiny “ears,” and Venus’s phases. The wide field of view frames big open clusters like the Pleiades beautifully, and under a dark sky you’ll catch the Orion Nebula and Andromeda as soft glows.

Two buying notes. First, there’s no finder on the base model — the ~$20 FirstScope accessory kit (finder + two better eyepieces) is almost a mandatory add-on. Second, Celestron now also sells this scope as the FirstScope Signature Series “Moon by Robert Reeves” with a gorgeous lunar-photo tube — same telescope, so grab whichever is cheaper. Its sibling, the Cometron FirstScope (better Kellner eyepieces plus a finder), is discontinued but still floats around retail — at $60-65 it’s worth grabbing while stock lasts.

Celestron Travel Scope 70 – Best Refractor Kit Under $100

If you’d rather have a classic refractor on a tripod — the shape everyone pictures when they hear “telescope” — the Travel Scope 70 is the safest way to get one under $100. It lists around $120 but spends much of the year at $80-100, and sale prices have dipped to the low $70s.

The 70mm, 400mm f/5.7 optical tube is fully coated glass and shares its core specs with the Gskyer below — but with the things a nervous first-time buyer actually cares about: a big brand, US-based support, and a two-year warranty. Space.com has repeatedly recommended it as a first telescope, and it’s easy to see why: the whole kit, tripod included, packs into the supplied backpack.

The erect-image diagonal means it doubles as a daytime spotting scope for birds and landscapes — right-side-up images, no fiddling. At night you’ll get crisp lunar craters, Jupiter’s moons, Saturn’s rings on steady nights, and bright clusters.

The weak spot — and reviewers are unanimous here — is the lightweight tripod, which wobbles at high magnification and is short for a standing adult. It’s the price of a kit this portable; treat it as a scope for a table or a seated observer and it does fine.

Gskyer 70mm AZ – Most Complete Beginner Bundle Under $100

The Gskyer 70mm has been one of Amazon’s best-selling telescopes for years, and the recipe is obvious: nobody else stuffs this much into a sub-$100 box. Alongside the 70mm f/5.7 tube you get two eyepieces (25mm and 10mm — newer kits add a 5mm), a 3x Barlow, a smartphone photo adapter with a wireless shutter remote, a finderscope, and a carry bag.

Is it hype, or is it good? Honestly — both, in measured doses. The optics themselves are perfectly serviceable for the money: reviewers consistently find the glass acceptable and the views of the Moon genuinely good, with Jupiter’s moons and Saturn’s rings within reach. Family-oriented reviewers rate it a solid kids-and-travel pick; the strictest enthusiast site, meanwhile, dings it for the wobbly tripod, the 45° diagonal that’s awkward for overhead viewing, and mount controls that don’t match the marketing. Both camps are right.

Our advice: buy it as what it is — a fun, generously-equipped starter kit for a kid or a curious family, typically $90-100 and regularly on sale below $85. The phone adapter is a real hook: a first photo of the Moon through the eyepiece does more to keep a beginner hooked than an extra 5mm of aperture ever will. Just don’t expect the 3x Barlow’s advertised “120x” to look like anything but mush.

Svbony SV501P – Best Ultra-Budget Travel Scope

Svbony built its name selling surprisingly decent budget eyepieces and finders to amateur astronomers, and the SV501P carries that DNA: it’s the cheapest scope on this list — often well under $80 — yet independent testers keep concluding the little 70mm f/5.7 achromat “performs astonishingly well for the price.”

The whole kit — tube, aluminum photo tripod, 20mm Kellner eyepiece, finder, erect-image diagonal and backpack — weighs about 6.5 lbs. That makes it the natural glovebox-and-carry-on telescope: the one you actually bring to the campsite, which beats the bigger one you left at home.

The corners cut to hit this price are real: only one eyepiece in the box (plan on adding a 10mm, ~$20), a dim 5×24 finder, and — the usual story — a flimsy tripod. Users on astronomy forums call it “definitely usable” at low power but agree it runs out of steam past roughly 45x. Moon, planets-as-bright-dots, big clusters, daytime spotting: yes. High-magnification planetary detail: no.

What We No Longer Recommend

• Celestron PowerSeeker 80EQ — a pick in our earlier version of this guide, but it now sells for $170-210, double this list’s budget. And with reviewers rating its bundled accessories poorly, the money is better spent elsewhere at that price anyway.
• National Geographic 76/350 tabletop — still sold at $90-100, but it shares the FirstScope’s spherical-mirror limits while costing more. Reviewers’ consensus: just get the FirstScope.
• No-name Amazon specials — the $40-60 scopes with five-digit “magnification” claims and invented brand names. These are the “hobby killers” experienced astronomers warn about: wobbly, dim and frustrating. If a listing promises 500x for $50, keep scrolling.

What Happened to the Meade and Orion Picks?

Our previous guide featured the Meade Infinity 70 and 80, the Orion SkyScanner 100 and the Orion SpaceProbe II 76. All four are gone: Orion Telescopes & Binoculars and Meade Instruments ceased operations on July 9, 2024, and their assets were auctioned off in January 2025. As of this writing the brands have not been revived, and none of these models are manufactured or reliably available new.

The SkyScanner 100 in particular was the best sub-$100 telescope ever made, so if you spot a clean used one for $50-70, it remains a great buy — just know there’s no warranty behind it, and skip any “new” listing at an inflated price.

The Honest Truth About $100 Telescopes

Here’s what the most experienced reviewers in the hobby will tell you, and we’d be doing you a disservice to bury it: the under-$100 telescope segment is mostly compromises, and the experts’ standard advice is to either stretch the budget or buy good 10×50 binoculars instead — which show more of the night sky than any $50 telescope, with none of the frustration.

Both points are fair. If you can save up to around $300, a proper parabolic-mirror telescope like the Sky-Watcher Heritage 130P is a night-and-day upgrade — we cover it and its rivals in our guide to the best telescopes under $300.

But “save up more” isn’t always the answer, and hobbyist gatekeeping shouldn’t stop a nine-year-old from getting a telescope for their birthday. The four scopes above are the ones that deliver real views — the Moon’s craters, Jupiter’s moons, Saturn’s rings, the Pleiades — at a price that doesn’t hurt if the interest fades. That’s exactly what a first telescope is for.

Conclusion

• Buying for a young child, simplest possible: Celestron FirstScope 76 (+ the accessory kit).
• Want the classic tripod refractor from a big brand: Celestron Travel Scope 70.
• Want the richest box of goodies, phone photos included: Gskyer 70mm AZ.
• Tightest budget or a featherweight travel scope: Svbony SV501P.

Whichever you choose, spend your first clear night on the Moon along the terminator — the line between lunar day and night, where shadows make the craters leap out. That view, even through a $60 telescope, is the one that makes people fall in love with the sky.