Price: $499.99
Design: 6” reflector with 750mm focal length at f/5
Description: 6” reflector on Equatorial mount. Comes with (2) 1.25” Plossl eyepieces at 9mm & 25mm. It also includes a moon filter, a 6x30 finder scope and a Polar alignment scope that goes in the EQ mount itself.
Circumstances behind this Review
Born in Peru in 1965, I’ve been always interested in astronomy… but because of the way things are down there, owning a telescope was totally out of the question… I was unable to own one. (way too expensive)
I used to borrow my grandfather’s binoculars and enjoy the view as much as I could with his Carl Zeiss 7x50’s… and hoped that one day I would be able to own a scope of my own…
I moved into the United States about 13 years ago… and it is until now that I was able to get me a scope, not as big and expensive as I wanted, but a very good starter scope nonetheless…
I did a lot of research before I bought it… I made myself member of several Astronomy groups, on the Web and around the area where I live (Coconut Creek, Florida), and asked as many questions as I could think of, looking for answers and recommendations.
The Telescope and Accessories
I can’t describe how excited I was when I received the scope… it came properly packaged, and even though it comes with a good small manual, it was very easy to set up.
You can actually see & feel the quality of the scope as soon as you start getting the pieces out of the box. Everything is made of metal… there are no plastic pieces involved on any of the main parts that belong to the mount or the scope.
The telescope tube, rings, focuser, mount, tripod, accessory tray, finder scope, finder scope rings are all made of metal.
The Plossl eyepieces that come with the scope are of good quality, they are of the 1.25” size (standard).
The focuser is well built and very smooth…
Collimation
As of now I have not had the need to collimate my scope… it came perfectly collimated from factory (instruction on how to collimate are included in the scope’s manual)
Observations
So far this month (January 2001) I had about 12 good nights of viewing, in which I tried the scope on several objects.
The only bad thing is that where I live there’s a lot of light pollution, so finding some of the objects is a very time consuming task…
The views of the Moon, Jupiter, Saturn and Venus are great… very sharp and defined.
I had no problem viewing M42 (Orion’s Nebula) which looks great… and also the Pleiades group of stars looks very nice on the 25mm Plossl.
I had a hard time finding M31 (Andromeda galaxy), but not because of the scope, but because of my skies…
I can’t wait until I take this scope to darker skies to “really” see what it can do!
Conclusions
I’ve always wanted to get a computerized scope… but after doing all the research I did, finally came to the conclusion that a “good computerized scope” would not be on my price range but probably around $1500+, so I decided to get a good standard scope instead.
There’s not another scope under $500 that I would recommend more… (besides the Orion’s XT8 Dob if you’re only thinking about viewing and not taking pictures)
I’m very satisfied with this scope performance and quality.Submitted by Ivan E. Gastaldo - gastaldo@bellsouth.net - Coconut Creek, Florida