The short version
Lens & Lightyear earns a commission when you buy through a link on this site, at no extra cost to you. That is how the site is paid for. It does not change which products we pick, the order we rank them in, or what we say about them.
This page exists because the US Federal Trade Commission requires it, and because you are entitled to know how the thing you are reading gets funded before you act on it. It is written to be understood rather than to satisfy a regulator.
Amazon Associates
Lens & Lightyear 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.
Amazon is currently the only retailer we earn from. Our Amazon tracking identifier is `lensandlightyear-20`. Every buy button here passes through a link on our own domain first, which lets us count the click and swap the destination later without rewriting an article — it does not add anything to what you pay.
What is and is not an earning link
- Buy buttons and price buttons earn. Every one of them is marked with `#ad` and carries the technical `sponsored` attribute that tells search engines it is a commercial link.
- Links inside articles to other pages on this site do not earn. They are ordinary navigation.
- Links to manufacturer pages do not earn. We cite Celestron, Sky-Watcher USA, Bresser and other manufacturers as sources for published specifications. We are not in an affiliate relationship with any of them, and we earn nothing if you buy from them directly.
- We do not run display advertising, sponsored posts, paid placements or newsletters that sell inclusion.
What we have never accepted
- No free products. Nothing on this site was supplied to us by a brand.
- No payment for a placement or a ranking. Ever, from anyone.
- No brand review of drafts. No manufacturer has seen a page here before it was published.
- No paid inclusion in a roundup. A product appears because it fits the page, or it does not appear.
About the prices
Prices come from a live retailer feed and carry the date they were checked. If that feed has not run within 48 hours, every figure disappears from the site automatically and the buttons fall back to "check price". No price on this site is ever typed in by hand or carried over from an older version of a page.
Prices change constantly and the retailer's own page is always the authority. If you see a figure here that does not match what you find at checkout, the retailer is right and we would like to know — the contact page is the fastest way to tell us.
Merchants and programs
We only build tracked links for programs we have actually joined. Where we link a manufacturer we are not partnered with, that is a plain link and we earn nothing from it — we would rather send you to the better place to buy than to the better place for us.
If that changes — if we join a brand-direct program — this page will be updated before any tracked link goes live, and the buy button will continue to point at whichever retailer is genuinely the better option for you.
Questions
Ask. Write to info@lensandlightyear.com and we will answer, including questions about how much a particular link earns. Our editorial standards are on the editorial policy and our research method is on the methodology page.