The utter low-level beginner's hardware would be a cute, cheap, hand-held, 30-power, 11-inch-long Tasco scope that looks like what pirates had and can also be used for watching earthly matters like birds, landscapes and neighbors' windows because it shows a right-side-up image.
Most astronomical scopes show an inverted image because they have fewer lenses. The more lenses, the less bright the image is because lenses absorb and reflect some of the light, and that's why they do away with glass that would turn the image around, and not because they want to save money.
Such a tiny device can't be used for watching the planets but with it one will see the Moon as never before, and the Pleiades, a star cluster, which with the unaided eye is a mere splotch, will be seen as a constellation that looks quite like the Big Dipper (an asterism that is the long tail and the hip of the Great Bear, who in real life would never have such a tail). It ought to be called "the Tiny Dipper". I even managed to make a drawing of it.
One doesn't need optical instruments to draw the bigger constellations, or the tiny Southern Cross (if you're near the equator or lower down), which is as bright as a reflective traffic sign, and is being trodden on by the much bigger Centaur, which I was never ever able to see clearly.
As far as I could see, that's all one can do with it at night, unless one also finds window-watching amusing. From a fourth floor I could see a neighbor's bookshelf across the street on a first floor and was able to read the title on the spine of a thick book: Best Ghost Stories.
If one wants to see the Moon features and the Pleiades clearly one has to lean on something, like a wall, to keep steady. The focus tube slides back and forth.
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