Best premium skywatching gear you should consider in 2026

There are plenty of stargazers whose lives changed forever after purchasing a pair of Canon 18x50 IS UD binoculars. Expensive, heavy at 2.6 lbs (1.1 kg) and power-hungry they may be, but actuators inside the optics compensate for the motion in your body, effectively freezing objects for long enough to take a lingering look at everything from star clusters, the moon and comets. For the ultimate experience in binocular astronomy, point these 18x magnification, 50mm aperture binoculars at the solar corona during a total solar eclipse.

A touch more portable than the Canon 18x50 IS UD are these rival image-stabilized binoculars. With a tad less magnification at 16x and 40mm aperture, the TS-L 16x40 is just as effective at transforming wobbly-looking stars into sharp points. They weigh 1.9 lbs (856 g).

Once you’ve tried binoculars like the Canon 10x42L IS WP, it’s hard to go back. Weighing 2.6 lbs (1.1 kg), these work in the same way as the Canon 18x50 IS UD, but add all-weather armor and superior optical-quality L-series glass. They also have a wider field of view for sweeping across the Milky Way.

What if a pair of binoculars could not only tell you what stars and constellations you’re looking at, but also help you share objects with the person next to you? Probably the hottest product out there, these soon-to-be-released smart 10x50 Porro binoculars have a subtle AR overlay that shows the names of constellations and dozens of binocular objects — such as star clusters, bright nebulae and some galaxies — and allows you to pin an object for the next person to locate using arrows.

Read more: 'It felt like something out of Star Trek.' I got a first look at the Unistellar Envision smart binoculars

At its core, a 4.5-inch (114mm) reflector, the trick with the Unistellar eVscope 2 is not only its built-in camera sensor, but its addition of a Nikon-made electronic eyepiece. So, as well as capturing 7.7MP images of nebulae and galaxies, you can share views as if it were an optical telescope. That moment when a galaxy appears on your phone despite heavy light pollution is hard to beat, but this one has an extra dimension in the form of organized citizen science campaigns.

For a very smart telescope, look no further than the Celestron Origin Intelligent Home Observatory. Controlled entirely via a slick mobile app, it locates, tracks, stacks and processes images of nebulae and galaxies within minutes, with the Mark II's main upgrades being a higher resolution sensor, faster optics and improved AI processing. However, it is large, heavy and expensive — this is one to have permanently set up at home.

Weighing 5 kg/11 lbs, this sleek, compact and portable smart telescope is a cut above. Arriving on a small tripod, the Vaonis Vespera Pro smart telescope is controlled by the slick Singularity app, auto-aligning in seconds and stitching images to create panoramas well beyond its native field of view.

If you have a city apartment with a balcony, here’s a smart telescope designed for you. More compact than its other high-end models, the lovely-looking Unistellar Odyssey Pro is a 3.4-inch/85 mm reflector that automatically plate-solves the stars to self-align and starts live-stacking in minutes, turning faint fuzzies into colorful nebulae on your phone or tablet — even in the heaviest urban light pollution.

StarSense is where optical astronomy meets smartphone-era convenience. With a smartphone running Celestron’s StarSense app in a dock with a mirror, the phone’s camera is used to plate-solve the reflections of stars to align the telescope. The app then uses arrows to guide the user to manually move the telescope precisely onto selected deep-sky targets. It’s a smart telescope for those who prefer optical astronomy.

Read more: Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ review

Here’s an option for a seriously good step-up telescope. Ideal for those who want to get serious after spending a few years with a beginner’s scope, the NexStar 8SE — an 8-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain on a GoTo mount — can find thousands of deep sky objects at the touch of a button. Bolt a camera on, and it could also become a path into deep-sky astrophotography.

A grab-and-go GoTo mount that turns any small refractor into a smart deep-sky rig, the Star Adventurer GTi has built-in Wi-Fi and SynScan Pro app control, yet still looks and behaves like a regular equatorial mount. It’s ideal for precision tracking and astrophotography for DLSR or mirrorless cameras, or a compact astrograph telescope (payload capacity is 5 kg).

At some point, someone was going to come up with a portable star tracker that was both advanced and a joy to use. Cue the Benro Polaris Astro, a robotic tripod head to pair with a DSLR or mirrorless camera. An all-in-one star tracker that also does panoramas and time-lapses, an app handles polar alignment, object tracking and complex shooting programs. Able to take a 7 kg/15 lbs payload, it’s a slick solution for astrophotographers.

Here’s Wi-Fi telescope aimed at anyone who wants GoTo without the old-fashioned hand controller. At its core, the AstroFi 130 is a 5.1-inch 130mm Newtonian telescope — a solid all-rounder for lunar, planetary and bright deep-sky objects. The mount creates its own network; you connect a phone or tablet, run the Celestron SkyPortal app and tap what you want to see.