Ditto with drooling over one of these as a kid too, Lewis
It's in GREAT condition for being a Dump Dog!
Great find!
When I went with my parents to Hobbyco many moons ago (1983) to get my first ever scope, the price tag on the 13T was eyewatering and crushing to a kid's dreams.
For a barlowed Newt, you can do much worse than the 13T
. It has a respectably manufactured spherical mirror, which unless it actually is well figured, you are in for a world of pain with a faecal-ty one.
If you are after a TRUE Bird-Jones or Jones-Bird (take your pick on the order), the Tasco 8V is the one you are after. The clue being that it came with the Vixen Polaris mount, not the dicky EQ1 the 13T comes with.
Celestron also made a Bird-Jones Newt for a very brief time. Then mass production techniques were able to quickly punch out quality fast parabolic mirrors, and the Celestron Bird-Jones died a quick and quiet death.
FWIW, the Bird-Jones has a purpose made corrector lens that sits between the secondary mirror and the spherical primary. The corrector was designed to correct for spherical aberration. THIS is what made the true Bird-Jones, and hence the 8V, expensive - all the optical components were quality items. The pic below shows the optical window of an 8V removed from the OTA showing the corrector lens assembly below the secondary.
If the Newt you have has a lens shoved down the focuser draw tube, this is a barlowed Newt, NOT a Bird-Jones.
The lens is a cheap barlow, NOT a corrector lens of any description. It is purely ignorance that has people confuse the barlowed Newt with a Bird-Jones. The Bird-Jones is a specific telescope design, just like an SCT or Classical Cassegrain or Maksutov Newtonian. No one confuses these with any other scope design. The Bird-Jones is exactly the same.
One clue to the true nature of barlowed Newts is they are ALL cheap and on cheap and nasty wobbletron EQ1 mounts, they DO NOT correct for spherical aberration, plus whatever other image distortions there are from a poorly figured cheap-arsed spherical mirror. The Bird-Jones design was always an expensive way to overcome spherical aberration.
Alex.