Quote:
Originally Posted by mental4astro
I have owned 3 of the Celestron FirstScope table top reflectors. All have been terrible at high power....Would I recommend these cheap little scopes to anyone? It depends.
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Sorry to be so long in reading this great thread. Just wanted to add my pov on the FirstScope. I could not recommend this to anyone. It does resolve surprisingly well with a better eyepiece, I used Baader Hyperions. However the point of a first telescope should not be to teach " this product will not live up to any expectations out of the box despite the claims written on it. You need to spend more money for reasons we wont tell you right now to be happy and comfortable using this telescope". A first telescope should make people go wow and this package cant. Like most telescope packages bundled with everything you need the extra bits you need are always lowest quality to keep the bundle cost low, so mounts tend to be flimsy and eyepieces which do the heavy lifting with the photons give a view thats uncomfortable to get your eye in and full of all sorts of distortions further ruining expectations.
I have many times recommended and bought for friends The Orion 100mm Tabletop Dob that I bought. Its similar to the firstscope, a little bigger, red aluminium tube. But key with this scope is that the two eyepieces (10 & 25mm) it comes with are good quality, far above all other "supplied" eyeipeces I've had. Views out of the box really are crisp and comfortable which makes for an instant happy experience. Sure its only a little larger than the FirstScope and was when I got mine over twice the price, my experience was easily ten times better and I still use it regularly. I think it may be a true unicorn: a package that outperforms its price by miles nothing more to buy or replace to "get it working". Its the sort of scope that helps grab someone and keep them in the hobby. Yes you can spend a bit more and get something bigger and more capable but I bet thats only if you buy better eyepieces and for newbies they expect, and deserve, a good viewing experience out of the box. A bad experience they blame the OTA since they dont yet know a better eyepiece would help matters. Especially at the low end entry scopes a new eyepiece could easily cost more than the scope did. Children using my little orion have no trouble with kidneying blackout in the eyepieces and love to be able to point it all around the sky looking for things. Its also my first scope to show me Neptune about 6 years ago, star hopping with paper and digital charts I easily found the blue dot. Wasn't a disk, just a dot, definitely blue and definitely not sharp as the surrounding stars. Right where my digital map said it would be . It was a memorable find for me and still is on this little entry level scope. Saturn and Jupiter look beautiful in it too. So that's my recommendation for first timers or if you want to get someone into the hobby, even though it doesnt look impressive like the garbage that sometimes show up in aldi etc its simple and it really works well. No need to buy anything else. It also has a threaded socket under the mount to allow it to be attached to a regular camera tripod if you want. My First scope I converted to a white light solar telescope for sharing views with others, It won't focus with cam attached though (more modding required).