Editorial Policy
How every figure here is sourced, the claims this site refuses to make, and what happens when we get something wrong.
By Scooter M. · Published · How we pick
The sourcing rule
Every number published on this site falls into exactly one of three categories, and there is no fourth:
- Published by a manufacturer, with a link to the document it was read from, on the row where it appears.
- Computed from a published figure by a formula printed on the methodology page, with the arithmetic shown on the page.
- Rendered live from the price data layer, stamped with the date it was checked.
This is enforced structurally rather than by discipline. The site’s content model requires a named source alongside every specification, so a figure without a citation is a build error rather than something a reviewer has to catch.
Claims we refuse to make
These are not aspirations. They are a list of sentences that will never appear on this site, and the reason each one is on it.
- “We tested”, “in our testing”, “hands-on”, “we measured”. We have not looked through any telescope on this site. Writing otherwise would be a straightforward deception, and under FTC guidance an endorser must make truthful, substantiated statements.
- Any tenure claim about the author. No “long-time”, no “veteran”, no “seasoned”, no “X years”. The byline is framed by genuine interest, which is true, rather than by time served, which would not be.
- Any credential we do not hold. No degree, no certification, no “expert panel”, no “reviewed by our optical engineer”.
- Any testimonial or user quote. Scope & Sky has no reviews and no customers, so there is nothing to quote. A clean page beats a fabricated one, and this site ships with no testimonials section anywhere.
- Any star rating or aggregate score. A rating implies a measurement we have not made. None appears on a page here, and none appears in this site’s structured data either.
- Any brand-level superlative about ourselves. Scope & Sky is not “trusted”, “leading”, “top-rated” or “expert”. The word “best” on this site always attaches to the telescopes we rank, backed by the published method, never to us.
- Any price from memory. Prices render only from the live data layer, and it shows “Check price” rather than a stale figure.
Corrections
We will be wrong sometimes. A manufacturer revises a specification, a figure gets transcribed incorrectly, a product link goes to the wrong variant. When it happens:
- Tell us. Email info@scopeandsky.com or use the contact form. Naming the page and the figure makes it much faster to fix.
- We check it against the source. Every figure links to where it came from, so verifying a correction is usually a two-minute job.
- We correct the page and date the correction on it. The change is visible rather than silent, and the page’s last-updated date moves with it.
- If the error changed a recommendation, we say so. A specification error that moved a telescope up or down a ranking is worth naming explicitly, not just fixing.
Update cadence
| How often | What gets checked |
|---|---|
| Daily | Every price on the site, automatically |
| Weekly | Persistent “Check price” states, which usually mean a delisted product |
| Monthly | Availability of every top pick on every ranking |
| Quarterly | Every compiled specification, against the manufacturer’s current sheet |
| Annually | Saturn’s ring-plane geometry, which changes what a small telescope shows |
A page’s published and last-updated dates both render on it, and the sitemap’s last-modified value comes from the real content date rather than from the build timestamp. The daily price refresh redeploys the site, and a build-stamped sitemap would claim every page changed every day until search engines stopped believing the field.
Where the specifications came from
Every specification currently on this site was read from a manufacturer’s own product page on September 1, 2026, and each spec row links to the page it was read from. Where a maker publishes a figure only on a retail listing, the source label says exactly that. Where a maker does not publish a figure anywhere we could read it, the row is blank and says so.
Use of AI
Worth stating rather than leaving to inference: this site’s pages are drafted with machine assistance, and every figure on them is constrained by the sourcing rule at the top of this page. No specification here was produced from a model’s recall. Each one was read from a named document on a stated date, or computed from such a figure by a published formula, and both the document and the formula are linked where the number appears.
That constraint is the reason several spec rows on this site are blank. Filling them would have been easy and would have broken the only rule that makes the rest of it worth reading.