Affiliate disclosure

What we participate in

Aperture is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Our Associates tracking ID is telescopious-20.

Product links on this site are tagged with that ID. If you click one and buy something, Amazon pays us a small percentage of the sale. The price you pay is exactly the same as it would be if you had gone to Amazon directly — the commission comes out of Amazon’s margin, not out of your pocket.

Amazon’s affiliate cookie lasts 24 hours. That means if you click one of our links and then buy something entirely unrelated within a day, we may still earn a commission on it. We think you should know that, because most sites don’t say it.

🔴 The stars are Amazon's, not ours — and we refuse to mark them up

Every price, star rating and review count on this site is Amazon’s own data about its own listing, captured on a date and shown with that date attached — the current snapshot is from 2026-08-20. It is not a rating we assigned, not an average we computed, and not a score derived from testing. Nothing on this site is a review by us. Where you see a star rating, that is what Amazon’s buyers said, reproduced as a screening signal, and it drifts the moment we stop looking.

That distinction has a technical consequence we have deliberately accepted a cost for. We do not emit Review, AggregateRating or Product structured data anywhere on this site. Marking up somebody else’s ratings as though they were ours is exactly what Google’s guidelines forbid — “don’t aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites” — and it is what produces the star-studded search results you see across this niche. Those stars are worth real clicks. We give them up, because the ratings are not ours to claim and we are not the merchant.

🔴 We have never looked through any of these telescopes

Not one. Nobody here has spent a season with an 8-inch Dobsonian, star- tested a Schmidt-Cassegrain, or compared two mounts under the same sky. If we wrote that we had, you would have no way to check it — which is precisely why so many sites in this niche write it.

What we do instead: recommendations come from published manufacturer specifications — aperture, focal length, focal ratio, mount type, weight, read from the listing’s detail table rather than its marketing title — run through standard optical formulae we compute on the page: light grasp, Dawes’ limit, limiting magnitude, exit pupil, true field, imaging sample scale. Those are things physics decides from the numbers, and they are checkable. We also read verified-buyer complaints in volume, because that is where the failure modes are.

The limits of that method are real, and we state them rather than hide them. Computed optics cannot tell you how a mirror’s figure performs at high power, whether a particular unit arrived collimated, how a focuser feels after a year, or which of two scopes is nicer to use in the cold. Those answers need hands on equipment over years. When you need one, Cloudy Nights has decades of it, written by people with nothing to sell — we link there from every buying guide and earn nothing when you go.

What the money does not change

The clearest evidence we can offer is structural rather than a promise. On our main telescope guide we show that a whole cluster of 90 mm beginner scopes are optically identical on paper under different brand names, and the advice we give is to buy whichever is cheapest with a return window and spend the difference on a better eyepiece. That is a commission-reducing recommendation, printed in full, because it is the true one.

We also routinely tell readers that the expensive answer is the wrong one — that a motorised scope costs roughly double a Dobsonian for the same aperture, and that the aperture you will actually carry outside beats the aperture that stays in the garage.

What we do not do

No paid placements. No brand has paid to appear here, and no brand has been shown any of our content before publication. We have no sponsorship arrangements, no gifted products, and no relationship with any manufacturer mentioned on this site.

No invented reviewers. Everything here is written under the site’s own name. We have not created a fictional astronomer with twenty years under dark skies and a friendly headshot to make the advice feel more authoritative — a common practice in this niche, and one we think readers deserve to be protected from.

No fabricated testing. See the section above. We say what our method can establish and what it cannot, on every buying guide, including its limits.

Prices and availability

Prices shown here are a dated snapshot, not a live feed, and they change without us knowing. Amazon listings also drift — the same URL can quietly become a different model or a different aperture, which in this niche is not a small difference. Always check the current price and the current listing on Amazon before buying — the figure on the product page is the only one that is binding. The same applies to availability, ratings and review counts, all of which carry the date we captured them.

Questions

If something here looks like it was influenced by commission, tell us — see contact. We would rather correct a page than defend one. The privacy policy covers the other half of this arrangement: the cookie Amazon sets when you click.