Price
From Scope F70076
Revision as of 16:14, 13 October 2008
Price
This is one of these less than $100 telescopes, it is very similar to the Celestron PowerSeeker 76 AZ, which at least in Amazon.com costs $64, and to the Orion SpaceProbe 3 Altaz, which costs $99.95 at the Orion site, Bushnell, Tasco, Bresser, Sky-Watcher and the other companies also produce a similar telescope. Of these, I find the Orion SpaceProbe still to be better, because it has a 10mm eyepiece. In spite that my eyepieces are Huygens, this telescope has a good selection of eyepieces, and I found the 12.5mm eyepiece to be very useful, and the 4mm practically useless. But if you buy Orion SpaceProbe and your skies are light polluted, then you should certainly also buy a finder scope. The Celestron PowerSeeker selection of 20mm and 4mm eyepieces and the 3x Barlow lens (a quality of so powerful plastic Barlow lens is questionnable) is a very bad set at least for deep sky objects, and therefore if you buy the Celestron PowerSeeker 76 AZ or any similar telescope, certainly also buy an eyepiece around 10mm, you can still get a telescope for less than $100, but this additional eyepiece is absolutely necessary. This might be the cheapest alternative to this telescope, as when you buy Orion SpaceProbe, you likely also have to buy a finder scope. One problem with Celestron PowerSeeker though is that its 20mm eyepiece is erecting, which cannot be the highest quality eyepiece for a telescope, but maybe more importantly, this is not a typical solution for an astronomical telescope, and doesn't match the upside down image in the finder scope. But it may still be a quite satisfactory solution. This telescope did cost 64 EUR plus shipping costs, which also is less than $100, depending on the exchange rate. But there often is no choice for one who lives in Europe, other than to buy goods from countries like Germany, as shipping them from America is first expensive, and there would be troubles with customs formalities. So it can be said, that this is the European version of this family of 76mm reflector telescopes.
