Best Telescopes for Astrophotography

At some point, you hold your phone up to the eyepiece and take a picture. The result is disappointing. You expected something close to what you saw — a crisp disc of Saturn with distinct rings. What you got looks like a blurry dot.

That's the moment astrophotography starts. Because now you know what the goal is.

Astrophotography is a separate hobby from visual observing. It uses different equipment, requires a different mindset, and produces results that are genuinely extraordinary — things you can't see with your eye at all, rendered in colour and detail by stacking hours of faint signal. It also has a very specific failure mode: spending money in the wrong order.

This guide is about getting the order right.

The mount is everything#

More than any other piece of advice in astrophotography, this one matters. In visual observing, a shaky mount is annoying. In astrophotography, it ruins every single image. You're stacking multiple 3–5 minute exposures — any tracking error produces star trails, and star trails can't be fixed in processing.

The golden rule: spend at least as much on the mount as on the telescope. Many experienced imagers spend more.

The mount also has to be equatorial. Not just motorised — equatorial. An alt-az GoTo mount like the Celestron NexStar SE can track a planet for visual use, but it introduces field rotation during long exposures. This is not fixable. An equatorial mount tracks by rotating around an axis parallel to Earth's rotation, which keeps stars perfectly still. The Sky-Watcher HEQ5 Pro is the benchmark for entry-level AP mounts. Below it, tracking precision is generally not sufficient for 3+ minute subs.

Three types of astrophotography#

Before choosing any telescope, you need to know which of these you're actually trying to do. They need different equipment, different focal lengths, and different mounts.

Most people reading this want the middle option — deep-sky imaging of nebulae and galaxies. That's what the rest of this guide focuses on. If your goal is purely wide-field star fields and large nebulae, a star tracker and a short Petzval refractor like the William Optics RedCat 51 is a complete setup at a much lower entry cost. If you want to image planets, you need a different guide entirely — long focal lengths, video capture, and lucky imaging are the tools there.

Why refractors dominate imaging#

Reflectors and compound scopes have secondary mirrors. Secondary mirrors obstruct the light path, reduce contrast, and create diffraction spikes around bright stars — effects that are manageable visually but become more visible in processed images. A refractor has none of this. The light path is clean from lens to sensor, which is why nearly every serious AP setup at 70–120mm aperture is a refractor.

But not any refractor. The glass type matters enormously for imaging.

ED doublets are the sweet spot for most budgets. Triplet APOs eliminate residual colour almost entirely and are worth the price premium when you're pushing long integration times and printing results. Achromats — any refractor without ED or APO glass — are fine for visual work but produce halos that appear in even modest exposures.

One more variable: field flatness. Even a good APO will show curved stars in the corners of a large sensor without a field flattener. Some scopes — notably the Askar 80PHQ — have a flattener built into the quadruplet design. Others require a separate corrector that can add £100–£200 / $130–$250 to the budget.

What focal length do you need?#

Focal length determines your field of view and therefore what targets you can frame sensibly. A 250mm focal length fits the entire Milky Way arch into a single frame; a 670mm focal length is perfect for galaxies like Andromeda. Get this wrong and you'll either not be able to frame your target or have no detail in it.

Most beginners do best starting in the 350–500mm range — wide enough to frame most popular targets, long enough to show meaningful detail. This is where the ZenithStar 61, Askar 80PHQ, and WO GT81 all live.

Our picks#

Organised by tier. There's no shame in starting at Tier 1 — some of the best astrophotos on Cloudy Nights come from compact wide-field rigs, not thousand-pound APOs.

A few notes from the community data:

The RedCat 51 delivers optical performance that owners consistently compare favourably to high-end camera lenses in the 200–300mm range. The fit and finish is excellent. The known issues are mechanical, not optical — the Vixen dovetail is slightly undersized for some saddles (an ADM dovetail bar fixes this) and the Canon adapter has a small amount of play (check your adapter before imaging). Neither is a dealbreaker.

The Askar 80PHQ is well-regarded by the EAA and imaging community for optical quality and portability. The built-in field flattener is a genuine advantage for beginners. A recurring note in owner reports: dust bunnies can appear in the optical path during long sessions, and they can move between frames — something to monitor during calibration. The 80mm aperture is the one trade-off: faint outer galaxy structure requires significantly longer integration times than a larger aperture would.

The WO GT81 delivers exceptional corner-to-corner field flatness and has an integrated flattener. The caveat worth knowing: the lens cell design produces 6–8 diffraction spikes from the adjustment screw tips, which the manufacturer confirms is by design. Most owners find this acceptable or even add character to star images; some find it objectionable at extreme contrast. The community verdict is otherwise strongly positive.

The Askar 103APO requires careful attention to spacer configuration to achieve focus with certain camera and reducer combinations — this isn't unusual for serious imaging refractors, but it's worth factoring in setup complexity. Once dialled in, it's a highly capable imaging platform for narrowband and broadband work at a focal length that suits compact to medium galaxies well.

Build your setup#

Answer three questions to get a recommended scope and mount combination for your budget and goals.

The full cost reality#

The telescope is one line item. Here's what a complete imaging setup actually costs across three levels — including what you need on night one and what you can add later.

The most common mistake is underbudgeting the mount and overbudgeting the telescope. A £250 mount will undermine a £600 scope. The reverse isn't true — a modest scope on a great mount can still produce excellent images, and you can upgrade the optical tube later without touching the rest of the setup.

Software is often forgotten until the first night of data sits unusable on a hard drive. Siril is free and covers the full workflow from calibration to stacked image. PixInsight (around £270 / $340 as a one-off licence) is the community standard for serious processing and worth the investment once you've outgrown Siril's toolset. Both have extensive tutorial libraries — budget a few evenings of learning alongside your first imaging sessions.

What to avoid#

There's also a broader pattern worth naming: the instinct to buy the most impressive-sounding telescope first and worry about the mount later. It's the wrong order. The mount is the foundation everything else sits on. Buy that first, and the rest of the setup can be upgraded incrementally as your skills develop.

A note on smart telescopes#

If what you actually want is astrophotos without the learning curve, smart telescopes like the ZWO Seestar S50 are a legitimate alternative. They handle alignment, stacking, and processing automatically — producing shareable images in 20 minutes rather than 20 hours. The trade-off is smaller aperture, phone-based workflow, and less control over the result. For some people that's exactly the right call. For details, see our Best Smart Telescopes guide.