Shopping for a telescope for someone on your holiday gift list — even if that someone is you — has changed a lot in recent years.

For several years now, smart visual telescopes have been available at a reasonable price, allowing you to control them with a smartphone, tablet or pad. Gone are the days when you had to make long, intensive searches using star charts to find celestial targets like faint nebulae and galaxies. Now, with these smart scopes, you connect to your telescope via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, follow a few simple setup steps and tell it to find one of thousands of targets, like the Orion Nebula, and it slews to it. It doesn’t stop there, though. Some scopes can follow targets in the sky, compensating for Earth’s rotation. Without that, whatever you're viewing wouldn’t stay in your telescope's eyepiece for long.

Optically, there are basically three kinds of visual telescopes: familiar refractors, where light enters one end and you view from the other; Newtonian reflectors use parabolic mirrors at the rear; and Schmidt-Cassegrains are more or less a combination of refractors and reflectors. No matter what telescope you use, the eyepieces that come with it, and those you can buy separately, provide magnifications ranging from about 60 power — 60 times larger than your naked eye — to over 300 power. While magnification matters, light-gathering ability matters more. That's a telescope's main job. The more light you gather, the clearer the image will be at higher magnifications. In refractor telescopes, the wider the objective lens, the better. With reflectors, the wider the parabolic mirror in the rear of the scope, the more light photons you can collect. The same goes for Schmidt-Cassegrains. Galileo said it best: “Telescopes reveal the invisible.”

While Smart visual telescopes have boomed in the last several years, an even bigger development is smart photographic telescopes, no bigger than a breadbox, that can point and track celestial targets and are controlled via Bluetooth from a phone or pad. You don’t look through these telescopes; instead, they take celestial photographs. They have built-in astronomical cameras! Most generally range in price from $400 to $1500.

Honestly, with these new photographic smart telescopes, you’ll generally “see” a lot more detail and color than you would with a conventional visual telescope, even a large one. That’s not because of the visual telescope; it's more about the camera's ability to not only gather photons like our eyes do but also accumulate them, producing remarkable images. Our eyes and brain cannot accumulate photons that way. Smart photographic scopes do have a downside though. They do a poor job on planets because they’re small targets and are very bright. The scopes just don’t have the resolution to bring out much detail.

It’s something I wrestle with, but I believe that if you’re doing most of your stargazing in light-polluted cities or suburbs, a smart photographic telescope is the way to go. Especially if you want to get a young person into stargazing.

As it is with just about everything, you can use Amazon, which makes shopping so easy. I love it. You can buy a scope on Amazon, but if you run into issues, your options for help are very limited. I think you're much better off buying your scope directly from the manufacturer or a telescope dealership. The problem is that there aren’t many telescope dealers left anymore.

My favorite dealership is Starizona in Tucson, Ariz. I’ve done business with them for years. They have wonderful people who you can actually get help with, before and after the sale, even over the phone. Their website is starizona.com.

Now for my recommendations. You can find out more on the manufacturer's websites, but here’s a good start.

ZWO SeeStar S30 Pro: $699. You can really enter the world of astrophotography and get some genuinely lovely celestial images. The ZWO Seestar S30 Pro has a 30 mm aperture, is less than a cubic foot, and weighs less than five pounds. It’s simply amazing. Using simple Bluetooth software, you control the scope with your Smartphone or iPad. It’ll direct itself to the celestial target of your choice. Then it keeps the target in view and wirelessly projects an image of it on your phone or pad using a process called live stacking. As the sub-exposures build, the image gets clearer and clearer, and it's in color. It also has strong light-pollution filters that let you take amazing photos even in urban areas. It also has a tremendous autofocus system. What’s really special with the SeeStar S30 Pro is that it has an extreme 4K-class sensor and updated optics that let you capture a very large part of the night sky but also gives you the ability to crop. With its wide-field capability, it can capture large sections of the Milky Way band and star trails. You can also create large mosaics! It also does great lunar and solar photography, plus daytime photos and videos of scenery and more. It has incredible software options. You’ll love it!

ZWO SeeStar S50 Pro: $999. This scope is as sophisticated as the SeeStar S30 Pro, but with a larger 50 mm aperture, and is especially designed for really faint deep-space targets, even smaller ones.

DWARF mini Smart Telescope: Around $400. It has nearly the same capability as the ZWO SeeStar but, in my opinion, doesn’t produce as high-quality images. The trade-off is its affordable price and its claim to be the world's smallest smart telescope, weighing less than two pounds. You can easily fit it into a small backpack.

The Celestron First Scope: $75. It’s designed for children about 8 to 10 years old. It's a miniature reflector telescope with a small mirror. It's great for the moon and bright planets.

StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ Smartphone App-Enabled Newtonian Reflector Telescope: Around $500. It’s a larger reflector telescope you can point automatically with a smartphone.

StarSense Explorer 8" Smartphone App-Enabled Dobsonian Telescope: $879 It’s a much larger telescope than the StarSense Explorer DX 130AZ. It has a larger 8-inch diameter mirror which gathers much more light. Also controllable with a smartphone.

Celestron NexStar 6SE: $1,200. This Schmidt-Cassegrain type has a completely automated GoTo mount with a database that automatically locates and tracks objects for you. Just type in the celestial target you want to see, and it’ll electronically slew the telescope right to it and then track across the sky! I have this scope, and I love it.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and professional broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is also the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and at adventurepublications.net. Contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.