Nearly every telescope on an equatorial mount comes with setting circles. In theory, they show the right ascension and declination to which the telescope is pointed, making it simple to aim at any object whose coordinates you look up. In practice, experienced observers generally regard setting circles as decorations to help sell telescopes, as a source of false hope for beginners, and possibly useful as makeshift frisbees.

We're talking here about traditional mechanical setting circles: rings engraved with lines and numbers on the telescope's two axes. More recent "digital setting circles," electronic readouts that tell where a telescope is pointed, can be vastly more accurate and useful; they're described at the end of this article.

Conventional setting circles are no substitute for learning to find your way around the sky by looking with your eyes. But having absorbed this lesson, many observers scorn their setting circles forever after, even in situations when they might be quite helpful.

The problem is that many adjustments and alignments have to be done very precisely before the circles will display right ascension and declination accurately enough to find objects "blind." Rarely are all of these adjustments made.

But if you have some knowledge of the sky, you can use the circles for less demanding tasks that have looser accuracy requirements. We will discuss this simpler type of use first, then go on to the more exacting applications.