Researchers have directly observed the optical Magnus effect for the first time, revealing a tiny shift in laser interactions that could affect the precise control of qubits in quantum computers. Anyone who has watched a spinning soccer ball curve around a defensive wall has seen what happens when spin changes an object’s path through the [...]Scientists have turned ordinary sunlight into a source of quantum entanglement, opening a surprising path toward more energy-efficient quantum technology. Quantum technologies often depend on powerful lasers that consume significant amounts of energy. As these systems grow larger and more widespread, their energy requirements could become an increasingly important concern. Now, researchers have demonstrated that [...]With fall now upon us, many of us will be dusting off our binoculars and telescopes ready for the longer nights this season brings. Earlier sunsets mean more stargazing hours, and we'll start to see the return of some favorite celestial sights and deep-sky objects that we haven’t seen since before spring.
Fall is also an excellent time for casual stargazers, with the earlier evenings and cooler temperatures offering a comfortable compromise before we head into those freezing winter nights when we can't feel our toes. Don't worry if you're just starting out and don't have any gear yet, as many of this season's celestial objects are visible with the naked eye — and some are actually best viewed that way.
This September, October and November are great times to view the distant planets at opposition, catch several meteor showers and photograph far-flung galaxies and nebulas with your smart telescope. Plus, November brings the first full supermoon of the year. So, grab your telescope, your headlamp and a cozy sweater, and let's see what lies ahead.
Neptune reaches opposition on September 26 at 02:00 UTC, which is the best time to view it at its brightest, magnitude +7.8. Unfortunately, the full moon will somewhat ruin the party, and Neptune isn't particularly easy to spot at the best of times. That said, the opposition window lasts for several weeks, so waiting a couple of weeks to observe during the new moon week won't make any noticeable difference.
You'll need a good telescope to spot the big blue planet — at least a 6-inch aperture, although an 8-inch or bigger will give you the best chance. Make sure you have a good quality, high-powered eyepiece (something like a 6mm or 9mm) or a good Barlow lens to boost the magnification of your existing eyepieces.
But even with high magnification, Neptune will only appear as a small disc with a bluish hue — you won't see any cloud bands or surface features, because it’s just too far away. Still, it's worth trying to get a glimpse anyway.
A week later, on October 4 at 12:00 UTC, Saturn reaches opposition, shining at magnitude +0.3. It will be easily visible to the naked eye, although to see Saturn's rings or any of its largest moons, you'll need a telescope.
The moon will be just below 50% illuminated and doesn't rise until past midnight, so you'll have a good portion of the late evening to observe Saturn while it's high in the sky before the moonlight affects visibility. Even though the rings are only partially tilted, you can still make out a lovely golden oval around the planet, and in larger telescopes you'll be able to spot the Cassini division. We recommend a telescope with at least 4 or 5 inches of aperture, and a good quality, high-powered eyepiece to observe the finer details.
November 24 brings the first full supermoon of fall/winter, when the bright Beaver Moon will light up the skies, shining around 15% brighter than a normal full moon.
You can enjoy this moon without any gear whatsoever, but observing with binoculars or a telescope, or capturing its magnificence with a camera, makes the experience much more enjoyable.
Until then, you can catch the other full moons of the season on September 26 and October 26.
The third planetary opposition of the fall belongs to Uranus on November 25 at 23:00 UTC. But like Neptune in September, the almost full moon will dampen its visibility, so we'd recommend waiting until the new moon week.
Like the other outer planets, you'll need a larger telescope with an aperture of at least 6 or 8 inches to view Uranus, alongside a good quality, high-powered eyepiece for the best views. These larger scopes gather enough light to distinguish Uranus's turquoise color, although you'll need to go even bigger if you want to see its brightest moons.
The first meteor shower of the season — and unlike most showers, which involve a lot of caffeine and an all-nighter, the Draconids are best seen in the late evening instead of the dead of night.
This meteor shower is active between October 6-10, peaking on the night of October 8-9. With the radiant point in Draco being highest at nightfall and the thin crescent moon not causing any interference, the best viewing hours are in the late evening before midnight.
These meteors are leftover debris from comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner, and you can expect to see around 6-10 meteors per hour under ideal conditions.
The Orionid meteor shower happens every October, when Earth passes through the trail of debris from Halley's Comet. In 2026, it's active between October 2 and November 7, with the peak occurring on the night of October 21-22. This shower brings between 10 and 20 meteors per hour under dark skies, radiating from the Orion constellation.
The waxing gibbous moon during the peak will add a fair bit of light pollution, but the moon will set between 03:12 am and 04:15 am depending on where in the States you're watching from, so you'll have a few hours before dawn to catch the darkest skies. You just need your eyes and clear, dark skies to see them, and a good astrophotography camera equipped with a wide-angle lens is perfect for capturing photos.
The Taurids meteor shower comes in two parts. The first is the Southern Taurids, active between September 10 and November 20, peaking on the night of November 4-5 (during a thin waning crescent moon). The Northern Taurids come slightly later and are active between October 20 and December 10, peaking on November 12 (during an even smaller waxing crescent moon).
The hit rate is one of the lowest of all the meteor showers, with only around 5 meteors per hour. However, the Taurids are known for producing bright, slower-moving fireballs that linger in the sky — making them a particularly appealing astrophotography target.
Peak viewing time will be around midnight, when the Taurus constellation reaches its highest point in the sky.
Radiating from the Leo constellation, the Leonids come from the dust and debris left behind by comet 55P/Tempel–Tuttle, which orbits the Sun every 33 years. They produce between 10 and 15 meteors per hour, and the shower period runs from November 6 to November 30, with the peak falling on the night of November 17-18.
The first quarter moon will set around midnight, making way for the best of the shower between midnight and 4 am in totally dark skies.
A favorite among many stargazers, the Pleiades (M45), an open cluster known as the "seven sisters" in the constellation of Taurus, slowly returns to the night sky this fall. By October, it rises in the east a couple of hours after sunset and is visible from dusk to dawn from November. Although it's about 440 light-years from Earth, you can see it with the naked eye under dark conditions — even though it's usually just a faint, fuzzy patch — but binoculars or a telescope provide a much more impressive view.
As Greek mythology has it, the sisters — named Maia, Alcyone, Asterope, Celaeno, Taygete, Electra and Merope — were the daughters of the Titan Atlas and Pleione. The story is that Zeus transformed them into a cluster of stars to escape the relentless pursuit of the giant hunter Orion, who fell in love with the sisters and chased them for seven years. It seems he couldn't take the hint.
Look below the Pleiades, and you'll find their five half-sisters, the Hyades — an open cluster which makes up the V-shaped face of Taurus, the Bull.
The Pleiades are a fantastic target to capture with a smart telescope. If you want to stack multiple sessions across fall and winter, start in late November when they're high in the sky. You want an altitude of 50 degrees or higher, and ideally 60 degrees or more. The cluster itself is easy to capture, but the less atmosphere you're looking through, the more you can pull out that delicate blue nebulosity, which is what takes an image of the Pleiades from good to spectacular.
Another enemy of that lovely blue glow is the moon, so make sure you're imaging under completely dark skies with no more than around 25% moonlight. If you get a clear, moonless night, aim for 2-3 hours minimum to capture the faint nebulosity, and go for 3-5 hours for a really impressive image.
The best time to see the Great Square of Pegasus is during the fall evenings between September and January, with October offering the clearest and highest views in the night sky.
This asterism is a large, prominent square shape made up of four bright stars in the eastern sky — Markab, Scheat, Algenib and Alpheratz — with the latter belonging to the neighboring constellation of Andromeda. The square is said to make up the body of the winged horse, and the four stars range from about 133 to 670 light-years away from Earth. Point a pair of binoculars at them, and they'll reveal many more stars that are not visible to the naked eye.
Cassiopeia is one of the Northern Hemisphere's circumpolar constellations, so although it's technically visible all year, it's best seen during the autumn and winter months. Throughout the fall, it climbs higher and higher in the sky, reaching its upper culmination in mid-November, when it is best viewed between 9 pm and midnight.
Depending on its rotation in the sky, Cassiopeia appears as a "W" or "M" shape made up of five bright stars ranging from 19 to 425 light-years away and visible with the naked eye.
Cassiopeia was a vain, arrogant queen in Greek mythology, and after boasting that she and her daughter, Andromeda, were more beautiful than the Nereids, the gods placed her in the sky tied to her throne, where she spends half of the year upside down as punishment for her vanity.
In addition to the constellation itself, there are some fun hidden objects within Cassiopeia that require binoculars or a telescope. The Owl Cluster (NGC 457) is a bright, open star cluster near the bottom-left star of the W shape, containing around 150 stars (although only 60 are identified as true cluster members), and is roughly 8,000 light-years from Earth. The blue and yellow "eyes" consist of the stars Phi Cassiopeiae (magnitude +5.0) and HD 7902 (magnitude +7.0).
You'll need a pair of astronomy binoculars to see it — go for 15x70 for a decent view, or 20x80 for an even better observation.
Caroline's Rose (NGC 7789) is another open cluster in Cassiopeia, situated close to the last of the five bright stars in the "W" shape. Astronomer Caroline Herschel discovered the cluster in 1783 and it contains over 1,000 confirmed member stars, with estimates suggesting up to 3,000 potential stars.
It was named "Caroline's Rose" or the "White Rose" because its winding loops of stars and dark empty lanes resemble the petals of a cosmic rose, and it is estimated to be around 1.4 to 1.7 billion years old.
You can see it with a pair of binoculars under reasonably dark skies, but the best views will come from a telescope.
Our closest neighboring galaxy, Andromeda (M31), is about 2.5 million light-years from Earth and may one day collide with the Milky Way ("one day" being a 50/50 chance around 10 billion years from now, according to new research). But until then, we can easily make do with observing from afar with binoculars and telescopes.
October and November are prime evening viewing time, with the galaxy reaching its highest point between 7 pm and 11 pm. Under clear, dark skies, it's the most distant object visible to the naked eye, appearing as a very faint smudge — provided you know where to look. Binoculars provide a marginally better view of a somewhat larger, slightly brighter faint smudge — we've managed to see it with a pair of 8x25s under dark skies — but for the best views, you want a telescope.
It's a great first target for beginners using a smart telescope, with the prominent dust lanes revealing themselves after 30-60 minutes. If you want more detailed images of the faint outer arms, leave it for 3-4 hours. Moonlight can wash out the faint galactic arms and dust lanes, so if possible, choose a dark night with minimal light pollution.
In Greek mythology, Andromeda was the daughter of the aforementioned Cassiopeia. After angering the sea god Poseidon, Cassiopeia (who was not exactly Mother of the Year) chained Andromeda to a rock as a human sacrifice to the sea monster, Cetus, that Poseidon had sent to ravage their kingdom's coast. Andromeda was saved by Perseus, who she then married, and after her death, Athena placed her in the stars as a constellation.
The Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) is a large planetary nebula around 650 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. Often called the "Eye of God", it has a striking eye-like appearance, and it features thousands of comet-like radial filaments and complex gas rings.
It stays relatively low in the southern sky, with September being the best time to view or photograph before it gradually sinks over the coming months. Moonlight will completely wash out its faint outer gaseous ring, so it's best to shoot during a new moon (or when the moon hasn't yet risen) to get the best image possible.
The best hours to capture it are between about 10:30 am and 2 am, when it's either rising or at its highest. This should get you a pretty decent standard image, but if you want more detail, try to capture it over several nights to pull in the faint outer nebulosity and stack the images.
The Triangulum Galaxy (M33) is the third-largest in our local group of galaxies, behind the Milky Way and Andromeda. This stunning spiral galaxy — not to be confused with the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101), which is best seen in the spring — sits in the small Triangulum constellation about 2.7 million light-years from Earth and is a great astrophotography target.
Its peak viewing time is October to December, when its highest and clearest position is after dark in the late evening. Because it's so faint, you need a moonless night away from light pollution. The sweet spot for smart telescopes is around 90 minutes, but if you can shoot for longer or want to split your shoot across multiple nights, 2.5 to 4+ hours can bring out more detail in the core and spiral arm.
The Heart and Soul Nebula is a nebula complex consisting of two massive emission nebulas located about 6,000 to 7,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia. They are primarily made of glowing ionized hydrogen gas, darker cosmic dust lanes and trace amounts of ionized oxygen and sulfur.
Like most other nebulas, they aren't visible to the naked eye, so you'll need a telescope or a long-exposure astrophotography setup to see them. The Heart Nebula (IC 1805) is, unsurprisingly, named after its heart-like shape, while its neighbor, the Soul Nebula (IC 1848), has a more irregular shape with large cavities made by stellar winds.
If you're imaging the Heart and Soul with a camera or smart telescope, a total integration time of 6 to 12 hours will provide you with the cleanest details and most contrast in the faint gas structures. That said, 2 to 4 hours will give you a good basic stacked image.
As Cassiopeia is at its highest in the fall, this is the best time to see and photograph it with the least amount of atmospheric interference.
The Ghost of Cassiopeia, often referred to as the Ghost Nebula (IC 63), is a mixed reflection and emission nebula around 550 light-years away in Cassiopeia. Its eerie red glow is caused by its proximity to the nearby blue giant star, Gamma Cassiopeiae, which sits right in the middle of the constellation's distinctive 'W' shape. The star’s powerful ultraviolet radiation causes the hydrogen to emit a soft red glow, while the surrounding dust reflects the star's light in fainter blue hues.
Like the other celestial sights in Cassiopeia, autumn and winter evenings are the best times to see and photograph it due to its high altitude in the sky. As the nebula is so faint and elusive to capture, you can only see it with a smart telescope or a long-exposure astrophotography setup.
When it comes to integration time, the longer the better. Aim for 3-5 hours minimum, ideally 6+ hours if the skies allow, and avoid shooting during moonlight if you can.
The Celestron StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ is a 5.1-inch (130mm) f/5 Newtonian reflector, one of many 130mm f/5 reflectors offered by Celestron. The DX 130AZ is also one of two 130mm StarSense Explorer variants, the other being a tabletop Dobsonian. The optical tube here rides on an alt-azimuth tripod instead and uses a 2-inch focuser, but otherwise, there are no major differences.
The DX 130 AZ is certainly one of the better telescopes in the StarSense Explorer series; there are also several decent Dobsonians, a pair of decent Schmidt-Cassegrains, the merely acceptable DX 102 refractor, a 114mm Bird-Jones model and some small refractors that aren’t of much use.
The DX 130AZ is definitely on the small end of what can be called a "serious" instrument, but even under a fairly light-polluted sky, it’s big enough to show you plenty of deep-sky objects and, of course, stunning detail on the moon and planets.
The DX 130 rides on the same alt-azimuth mount/tripod shared with the other StarSense Explorer DX models. It’s reasonably sturdy, with one major caveat: you can’t actually point the DX 130 straight up. When aimed above about 70 to 75 degrees, the tube crashes into the mount or the tripod legs.
However, there is a simple workaround here. Deliberately set the tripod up unlevel, which lets you reach the zenith without affecting the mount or the StarSense system at all. It looks a little silly, but it works. The tripod is fairly stable as long as you’re not in a windy spot. Loading the accessory tray with sandbags or diving weights, or filling the hollow aluminum legs with sand or foam, helps considerably if you’re willing to do a bit of DIY work.
The mount has slow-motion controls with small gears for fine adjustments. They have a fair amount of play in them, but since this telescope is really only meant to be used up to about 200x magnification or so, it doesn’t matter much. In practice, the author barely used the slow-motion controls and simply nudged the scope by hand. For aiming the DX 130AZ, a red dot finder is provided in addition to the StarSense Explorer tech.
The StarSense Explorer DX 130 AZ comes with two eyepieces: a 25mm (26x) and a 10mm (65x). These are three-element eyepieces, likely Konigs or reversed Kellners. They work acceptably; the 25mm is a little blurry at the edges, and the 10mm shows some chromatic aberration toward the edge, but both are reasonably sharp. The bigger problem is that the housings are all plastic and there are a lot of internal reflections as a result.
Better aftermarket eyepieces would be a wise investment, both for improved performance and a wider range of magnifications. We’d recommend a 6mm redline (108x), a 2x Barlow of some sort and a good wide-field eyepiece like the 24mm APM/StellaLyra UFF (27x), if you can afford it — the 6mm redline gets a bit closer than the provided 10mm eyepiece and offers a much sharper view, while the 24mm UFF is far crisper than the stock 25mm. With a Barlow lens and the 6mm, you can go up to 216x on the moon, planets and double stars — about the highest magnification this telescope can allow. Or you can choose your own eyepiece set to suit your needs.
Optical design: Newtonian reflector
Mount type: Manual altitude-azimuth with StarSense smartphone dock
Aperture: 130mm (5.1 inches)
Focal length: 650mm
Focal ratio: f/5
Magnification: ~260x (highest useful)
Included eyepieces: 1.25” 25mm (26x) and 10mm (65x), 50 degree apparent field
Total kit weight: 18 pounds (8.16 kg)
The StarSense Explorer DX 130’s focuser is a 2.5-inch rack-and-pinion unit with a metal drawtube and plastic body. There’s some play in it, but it works acceptably well as long as you don’t overload it with too much weight. The focuser has adapters to accept both the provided 1.25” eyepieces as well as aftermarket wide-field 2-inch eyepieces, but at f/5, you really need a coma corrector of some sort to use the latter, which, along with the eyepieces themselves, will set you back quite a bit.
Being a Newtonian reflector, the DX 130 will usually need to be collimated for sharp images. Celestron doesn’t include a collimation tool, which is mildly annoying, but a basic collimation cap is cheap, easy to 3D-print, or can be improvised from a film canister. Overall, the DX 130 is lightweight and very portable, which is one of its real strengths — it’s easy to carry about, and the StarSense Explorer app will have no trouble plate-solving, even if you have to pick the scope up and carry it around the yard to avoid trees or other obstructions.
The DX 130 shows a great deal of detail on the moon, down to features a few kilometers across, and it’s genuinely sharp. The focuser is a little coarse, but with some finesse it will reach focus even at high magnifications. The 130mm f/5 optics can handle up to about 250x magnification on a night of steady atmospheric conditions, though the best lunar and planetary views are usually found somewhere between 150-220x and the mount starts to get wobbly as you push towards the higher end of that range.
On the planets, the DX 130 handles shadow transits of Jupiter’s moons easily, shows all four Galilean moons as disks and even reveals the Great Red Spot. Saturn’s rings are obvious, along with a smattering of a half-dozen moons, and the Cassini Division is visible when the rings are tilted more open than they are at present. Uranus is also visible as a tiny greenish disk, though its moons are not. It’s a struggle to distinguish Neptune from a star at all, but the StarSense Explorer app will help you identify which blue dot it is in a sea of similar looking 8th-magnitude points.
One practical note: you do need to keep your phone screen dim and red while using this telescope with the StarSense Explorer app. The app has a red mode, but notifications, or your phone simply reverting to the lock screen, can flash the screen bright, and even at its dimmest a phone screen can affect your eyes’ dark adaptation quite a bit. But for most people this won’t be a serious problem if the screen is dimmed fully and used with a proper red filter — either a software solution or a physical red film.
As for deep-sky objects, the spiral arms of the Andromeda Galaxy and M33 look fantastic under a dark sky, though under light pollution only their cores are visible. Globular clusters such as M13 and M3 begin to resolve, while more difficult targets are harder going — M53 was tough from Bortle 5 but doable from Bortle 2 conditions. Under a bright sky, open clusters like M11, M35 and the Pleiades are the main deep-sky attractions with this telescope; under a dark sky, fainter nebulae and galaxies shine far better while the strands of dark nebulae and galactic cirrus begin to show up around open clusters.
The brightest planetary nebulae start to resolve with the DX 130 regardless of sky conditions. Most observers won’t see much color in them with this scope’s relatively small aperture — though some people pick out a bluish-green tint in objects like the Ring Nebula and the Cat’s Eye Nebula — but regardless, they’re reasonably easy to see even from light-polluted areas, especially with an aftermarket nebula filter.
The StarSense Explorer DX 130 is, by design, a wide-field telescope, and one of its appeals is that you don’t strictly need any computerized pointing aids at all. The nice thing about the StarSense Explorer system is that it’s entirely optional — you can aim the telescope manually, with or without your phone docked, just like any other manual scope.
Set-up is quick: assemble the tripod and mount, attach the tube and an eyepiece, dock your phone, run the app’s alignment routine, and you’re observing. It’s much easier to get started with the StarSense Explorer than with a GoTo telescope, and you aren’t required to use it, either — for a quick gander at the moon or Jupiter for instance, there’s really no need to deal with the phone dock and app. With experience you might find yourself eventually not needing the StarSense Explorer tech at all, especially given the telescope’s wide field of view, which is quite forgiving of any manual pointing errors.
✅ You need a portable, tripod-mounted wide-field telescope.
✅ You want phone-guided pointing but also the option to aim manually.
✅ You frequently observe from sites with trees or obstructed horizons.
❌ You want the most aperture and stability for your money.
❌ You want motorized pointing and tracking capabilities.
❌ You want to observe close-up details in galaxies and globular star clusters.
On the value for money front, you could get a 6-inch or even an 8-inch Dobsonian for the price of the DX 130 if you’re happy with a fully manual scope, or you could look at one of the other options below. The DX 130 is more portable than a full-size 6- or 8-inch Dobsonian and has a much wider field of view with any given eyepiece — but if you don’t have a fairly dark sky, that advantage is somewhat less valuable compared to those telescopes’ considerably larger aperture, which helps reveal more on targets less affected by light pollution.
A reflector like this gives much better views than the cheap refractors sold at this price and offers a much wider possible field of view than catadioptrics. The StarSense Explorer DX 102, effectively this scope’s sister model, has too much chromatic aberration to deliver sharp high-power images and doesn’t gather as much light as the 130. The StarSense Explorer 5-inch Schmidt-Cassegrain is decent optically and is admittedly a little more forgiving of cheap eyepieces thanks to its longer focal ratio, but it’s no better for planetary work than the DX 130 with proper eyepieces, can’t deliver a wide deep-sky field of view, and gathers slightly less light overall.
Overall, the DX 130 wouldn’t be the author’s top recommendation, but it’s certainly in the top 10 for the price range. If you’ve already decided this is the kind of telescope that you want, it’s a perfectly good choice; just consider the Dobsonians first if you want a manual telescope, or a fully automatic GoTo instrument if you want something more high-tech.
For the budget-conscious
The Sky-Watcher Heritage 130P uses the same optics as the StarSense DX 130 but is cheaper and more compact thanks to its collapsible tabletop Dobsonian design. The StarSense Explorer 130mm Dobsonian is another option — the same optics again, in a tabletop Dobsonian without the collapsible tube.
For improved performance
A 6-inch f/8 Dobsonian like the Apertura AD6 or Sky-Watcher 6-inch Classic, or even one of the 8-inch models like Celestron’s own StarSense Explorer 8-inch, is much sturdier than the DX 130 or a tabletop scope/tripod, and offers easier collimation as well as higher performance with inexpensive eyepieces. However, they’re quite a bit bulkier and heavier than the DX 130 or a tabletop Dobsonian.
For portability and ease of use
If you want fully computerized pointing, Celestron’s Astro Fi 130 offers identical specs to the StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ but with full GoTo and tracking operated via your smartphone instead (and can be aimed straight up). However, set-up is much more time-consuming as you can’t simply put the telescope down and go.
The CL Companion is Swarovski's dedicated compact binocular, originally introduced 15 years ago, but has now been redesigned in 2026 to appeal to a wider, younger audience. RSPB research found an increase of around 1,000% in birdwatching among Gen Z in the UK since 2018, with a similar boom now happening in the US.
The CL Companion sits between the pocket-size CL Pocket and full-size EL and NL ranges, making it the perfect mid-range model that combines portability with excellent optical prowess.
The Companion is a grab-and-go, "take it anywhere and everywhere" binocular that is perfect for many different activities, whether that's spotting birds, scoping out your hiking trail or sweeping across the starry sky at night.
We spent a week with both the 8x30 and 10x30 CL Companions to test them out, with the former being ideal for tracking movement with a wider field of view, while the latter brings you closer to the details.
The biggest change in comparison to the old-style CL Companion is in the design. The original version was more of a traditional binocular aesthetic, but this updated design breathes life into the range with three new earth-toned colorways: mountain green, desert orange and safari brown. While some users have said they look somewhat toyish (or just downright ugly), when you handle them in person, they are much more sleek and stylish than the product images would have you believe.
Both the 8x30 and 10x30 weigh just 1.21 pounds (550 grams), so you can easily wear them around your neck all day without even knowing they're there. They're compact enough to put in a large jacket pocket, or you can just wear the included carry bag.
Magnification: 8x / 10x
Objective lens diameter: 30mm
Weight: 1.21 pounds (550 g)
Exit pupil: 3.8mm / 3mm
Field of view: 8-degrees / 6.6 degrees
Close focusing distance: 9.8 feet (3 m)
The central focus wheel has just the right amount of slip to make it easy to change focus, but is not so loose that you don't have enough control over it. The diopter is located on the front of the focus wheel, which felt a little off at first, but once we set it, there was no danger of accidentally changing it.
They also have generous eye relief, which is great news for users who wear glasses. The eye relief is 19mm on the 8x30 and 18mm on the 10x30. We used them on a bright, sunny day during a heatwave and were easily able to observe while wearing sunglasses with no issues at all.
Out in the field, the CL Companions proved to be particularly well suited to daytime birding — although with 90% light transmission, they'll still hold their own at dawn or dusk. Both the 8x30 and 10x30 had a clear, sharp image, with plenty of detail across the image circle. The 8x30 felt particularly easy to use when trying to pick up birds quickly, while the 10x30's extra magnification was great for getting a closer look at more distant subjects.
The color reproduction was natural, and the views had good contrast without looking over-processed. Fine details on feathers were easy to pick out, even on smaller birds. There was a tiny sliver of color fringing towards the edges in high-contrast situations, but it didn't spoil the view whatsoever, and you'd only notice it if you were actively looking for it (which we were). Every time we have used a pair of Swarovski binoculars, there's a three-dimensional viewing experience and depth to the image that you just don't get with cheaper brands.
Both models performed well in the bright daylight conditions we were using them in, both in terms of optical clarity and comfort when using them for longer periods. Their small size and light weight meant we could comfortably track birds in flight without having to take breaks, which is often a dealbreaker when it comes to choosing a pair of birding binoculars.
The wide field of view is one of the more useful features for birding. The 8x30 has a 549 ft (140m) FOV, while the 10x30 has 377 ft (115m) — both of which are wider than the original generation of CL Companion. Both made it easy to find birds when scanning trees and bushes, and there was enough space around the subject to follow them easily after they took flight.
The close focusing distance of 9.8 feet (3m) was also handy when birds came closer, and enables you to observe insects like bees and butterflies without spooking them by getting too close. And with the smooth focus wheel, it was easy to change focus between the two distances.
Both models are waterproof down to 13 feet (4 m), which is likely more protection than most people will need, but it is reassuring when using them outdoors in the rain, or if you were to accidentally drop them in a puddle.
On paper, they tick all the boxes. The optics are excellent, and they're lightweight and easy to carry. But with Swarovski being very upfront about the fact that it’s going after a younger audience with these CL Companions, we have to wonder what young person would have a spare $1,500 to spend on a pair of binoculars? It's not a small investment, so you'd need to be a dedicated observer to spend that kind of money.
That said, they're much more than your typical compact binoculars. They're a genuinely impressive binocular with stunning optics built into a small and compact package. Typically you need to compromise on one or the other, but the CL Companion gives you the best of both worlds.
Something more premium
Dedicated birders who want a more premium option will want to look at the Swarovski NL Pure range. They're one of the best binoculars we've ever used, and you'd never have to buy another pair again. We tested the 8x32, but if you like to observe at dawn or dusk, the 8x42 would be ideal.
Read our full Swarovski NL Pure 8x32 review
Something more compact
The Hawke Endurance ED 8x25 are tiny, pocket-sized compact binoculars with genuinely impressive optics. Our optics writer loved testing them so much she went out and bought herself a pair.
Read our full Hawke Endurance ED 8x25 review
Something better for stargazing
Dedicated stargazing needs a bigger objective lens diameter — we love the Celestron SkyMaster Pro 20x80, although you'll need to mount them on a tripod.
Read our full Celestron SkyMaster Pro 20x80 review
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