Pick a telescope and see the lowest current prices on eBay, where a hobby with a steep learning curve puts a lot of barely-used equipment back on the market every spring. Prices are pulled live, so what you see is what sellers are asking this minute.
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Browse the full range of used telescopes on eBay → Prices move fast. See the biggest price drops across every category this week →Aperture is the number that decides what a telescope can actually show you, because it is how much light the thing collects. Magnification is not: you can change that with a $30 eyepiece, and a cheap scope advertising 675x is selling you an empty, blurry image. So every scope here is ranked by what a millimetre of aperture costs at today's price. Lower is more light for your money. Four scopes are missing from the ranking, and the reason is in the note under the table. Tap a scope to see its listings.
| Telescope ↕ | Cheapest now ↕ | vs recent ↕ | Aperture ↕ | $ / mm ↕ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $31 | ▲3% | 76 mm | $0.41 best value | |
| $68 | flat | 127 mm | $0.54 | |
| $41 | ▼2% | 70 mm | $0.59 | |
| $60 | flat | 70 mm | $0.86 | |
| $130 | ▼7% | 130 mm | $1.00 | |
| $100 | flat | 80 mm | $1.25 | |
| $158 | ▼17% | 114 mm | $1.38 | |
| $300 | ▲20% | 127 mm | $2.36 | |
| $350 | – | 130 mm | $2.69 | |
| $325 | flat | 100 mm | $3.25 | |
| $350 | flat | 102 mm | $3.43 | |
| $460 | flat | 125 mm | $3.68 | |
| $500 | flat | 130 mm | $3.85 | |
| $635 | flat | 120 mm | $5.29 | |
| $800 | flat | 150 mm | $5.33 | |
| $1,130 | flat | 203.2 mm | $5.56 | |
| $1,500 | flat | 203.2 mm | $7.38 | |
| $1,600 | flat | 203.2 mm | $7.87 |
One thing the ranking cannot tell you: the cheapest scopes per millimetre are small tabletop reflectors, and a wobbly mount will ruin a good tube faster than a few millimetres of aperture will save it. Read the top of this table as the cheapest light, not the best telescope. Meade's LX90 and LX200 are sold in 8, 10 and 12 inch versions under the same name, so there is no single aperture to divide by and both sit out of the ranking. The Orion StarBlast and the Unistellar eVscope are out for a duller reason: neither maker publishes a readable specification page any more.
Aperture is the spec, and it is the one nobody markets. The number that decides what you can see is the width of the main lens or mirror, not the magnification printed on the box. A 130mm reflector gathers roughly three times the light of a 70mm refractor, and no eyepiece can make up the difference. Any advert leading with "675x power" is selling to someone who does not know that yet. The model numbers here mostly encode it: an AstroMaster 130EQ is 130mm, a Skymax 127 is 127mm.
The mount matters as much as the tube. A sharp telescope on a mount that shakes for four seconds after you touch the focuser is not a usable telescope. Buying used is the one time you can get a serious mount cheaply, because they outlive their owners' interest, and it is worth asking the seller to nudge the tube on video and show you how quickly the view settles.
Check the mirror coatings on anything old. A reflector's mirror can be recoated but it costs a good fraction of what these sell for, so look for a photo straight down the tube. Dust is fine and normal. A mirror that looks cloudy, blotchy or has patches where the coating has lifted is a repair bill rather than a bargain.
Computerised scopes fail in specific, checkable ways. Ask whether it completes a star alignment, whether the hand controller is present, and whether the motors run in both axes without grinding. A NexStar that will not align is a dobsonian you have to lift. The good news is these are mature designs with parts around, so a working one from ten years ago works exactly as it did.
Eyepieces are the hidden second purchase. The ones bundled with budget scopes are usually the cheapest part of the package, and the upgrade is where the next couple of hundred dollars goes. When you compare two listings, count what is in the box: a scope arriving with three good eyepieces and a decent diagonal can be better value than a bare tube at half the price.
Big scopes get sold because they are big. The most common reason a large instrument comes up cheap is that its owner stopped carrying it outside. Be honest about where you will store it and how far you will move it, because the telescope you actually use beats the one with the bigger mirror every clear night.
Live eBay listings. Pick a model and it fetches the current lowest-priced listings in real time, with the listing shown next to each price, so nothing here is an estimate.
Aperture, the width of the main lens or mirror in millimetres. It decides how much light the telescope collects and therefore what you can actually see. Magnification is set by the eyepiece and can be changed for a few dollars, so a listing that leads with a power figure is selling the wrong number.
Safer than most used optics, because the expensive parts have no wear items. Glass and mirrors last decades. The things that do fail are motor drives, hand controllers and mirror coatings, and all three can be checked with a question and a photograph before you bid.
A reflector gives the most aperture per dollar and needs occasional collimation. A refractor needs no alignment and is the easiest to live with, but costs far more for the same aperture. A Maksutov or Schmidt-Cassegrain folds a long focal length into a short tube, which is why the NexStar and LX200 families are the popular computerised choice.
The diagonal, the finder and the good eyepieces, in that order, along with the hand controller on computerised models. None of them are catastrophic but together they are worth more than most people expect, so count what is in the box before comparing two prices.
The mount, almost always. A modest tube on a steady mount shows more than a large tube on a shaky one, because at useful magnifications every vibration is magnified too. This is the main thing the secondhand market lets you fix cheaply.
A daily snapshot of the lowest genuine eBay price for every model we track, and how good that price is right now versus its usual level, updated automatically. Prices last refreshed 12 October 2026. Tap a price to see that model's cheapest listings on eBay, or tap a model name for the full live list here.
These are second hand prices, listed by sellers as used or pre-owned, taken from live eBay US listings in US dollars. In collectible categories a sealed or unworn item is sometimes the cheapest genuine listing, and it is included. The same number works both ways: it is what a buyer pays today and the resale value a seller can realistically ask. Every model also carries a price history, the daily record kept since tracking began, which is the part to read before you buy or resell. On a day when a model has no listing that passes these filters, its row keeps the last price we recorded rather than inventing one, and drops off this table if that goes on for more than a few days.
Under each model is the actual listing that price came from, so you can see whether it is the thing you want or a bundle, a variant, or an accessory that happens to share the name.
Over the period we have tracked, this category has not moved, while the used market as a whole is down 0.3%. See the Used Price Index, which is built from these prices and published as a free CSV.
| Model ↕ | Cheapest now ↕ | vs typical ↕ | vs recent |
|---|---|---|---|
Celestron NexStar Evolution 8 Celestron NexStar Evolution 8-Inch SCT GoTo Telescope | $1,500 lowest yet | 37% under | steady |
Orion StarBlast 4.5 Orion StarBlast 4.5 113mm f/4 Reflector OTA Telescope EZ Finder II Pre-2023 O… | $100 lowest yet | 17% under | steady |
Celestron AstroMaster 114EQ Celestron AstroMaster 114EQ Newtonian Telescope #31042 w/ Stary Night Software | $158 | 17% under | ▼ 17% |
Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ celestron astromaster 130eq telescope | $130 lowest yet | 7% under | ▼ 7% |
Celestron Travel Scope 70 Celestron Travel Scope 70 Refractor Telescope 70mm w/ Tripod Backpack 21035 | $41 | about typical | ▼ 2% |
Celestron AstroMaster 70AZ Celestron AstroMaster 70AZ Refractor Telescope 70mm 900mm f/13 Model 21061 W/… | $60 same 41 days | about typical | steady |
Celestron PowerSeeker 127EQ Celestron CG-2/EQ-1 Equatorial Telescope Tripod PowerSeeker 127EQ | $68 | about typical | steady |
Celestron StarSense Explorer LT 80AZ Celestron StarSense Explorer LT 80AZ Smartphone App-Enabled StarSense telesco… | $100 same 63 days | about typical | steady |
Celestron NexStar 127SLT Celestron NexStar 127SLT Computerized Mount w hand controller(no telescope tu… | $300 | about typical | ▲ 20% |
Celestron NexStar 4SE Celestron NexStar 4SE Telescope with Base, Tripod and Eyepieces | $350 same 17 days | about typical | steady |
Celestron NexStar 5SE Celestron NexStar 5SE Telescope | $460 same 63 days | about typical | steady |
Celestron Omni XLT 120 Celestron Omni XLT 120 EQ Refractor Telescope w/ CG-4 Mount Tripod | $635 same 51 days | about typical | steady |
Meade LX200 Meade LX200 "Classic" 8-inch f/6.3 Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope | $900 same 27 days | about typical | steady |
Celestron NexStar 8SE Celestron NexStar 8SE Computerized Telescope – Schmidt-Cassegrain | $1,130 | about typical | steady |
Celestron CPC 800 Celestron CPC 800 Starbright XLT GPS Computerized Telescope with Stand | $1,600 same 23 days | about typical | steady |
Celestron FirstScope Celestron FirstScope Reflector Telescope Dobsonian No Finder FREE SHIP | $31 | above typical | ▲ 3% |
Unistellar eVscope Unistellar eVscope eQuinox Digital Telescope Astronomy RARE | $2,371 same 13 days | above typical | steady |
Meade LX90 MEADE LX90 8" GPS TELESCOPE WITH UHTC AND EXTRAS | $1,900 same 12 days | above typical | steady |
Celestron NexStar 130SLT Celestron NexStar 130SLT f/5 Computerized Telescope | $500 same 11 days | above typical | steady |
Celestron NexStar 6SE Celestron Nexstar 6SE Computerized Telescope | $800 same 11 days | above typical | steady |
Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ Reflector Telescope | $350 | above typical | new |
Celestron Inspire 100AZ Celestron Inspire 100AZ Refractor Telescope | $325 same 20 days | above typical | steady |