Another ALDI telescope

[Nebulous (Chris)]

Originally Posted by gaseous

Thanks Chris, yes I think deep in my heart the Alt-Az scenario is much more likely to play out in the short term. Either way, it'll be simpler than pulling the 16" goto dob out at a moment's notice.

A 16" Goto Dobsonian..... Now I'm jealous!

[xelasnave]

I must have been confused this week because twice I was going in to look at one failing to remember they were not there until Sat.

I think you could try the eq set up and use it to explain latitude.

Good luck.

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by gaseous

Well, I bought one. Got there at 7.45am expecting hoards of people after Alex's dire warnings, but maybe the toxic chemical spill near the Hyperdome yesterday scared the budding astronomers away. Anyway, they had 18 in stock, so I only had to elbow one old lady out of the road, and that was mainly for fun and really only a half-hearted effort on my part.
I will preface the following comments by admitting that I've always been a dob person, so setting up an EQ mount was a new experience. The tripod is VERY lightweight, as you'd expect for $99.95, but goes together easily, as does the mount itself. All up it took less than an hour to assemble, and the Huygens eyepieces are indeed the sh!te you'd expect, but a couple of spare plossls lying about indicated that the scope, in the daytime at least, provides some pretty reasonable views. The finderscope is complete balls, but the scope itself was easy to collimate, if slightly odd looking down the tube to such a tiny primary. You certainly wouldn't want to bump it too heavily in the dark, but it looks quite a nice little scope for a youngster.
I've balanced it but haven't gone too deeply into the mumbo jumbo (to me) of the other axis settings - as it's for my son I don't know if this will be a big deal when we try it out tonight, but it may prompt me to become more eq-savvy. Anyhoo, first light report tomorrow morning, possibly accompanied by photos of me breaking it over my knee or hurling it onto the neighbour's roof.

Thanks for the info. Could you elaborate on the finderscope please? Is it stopped down - can you see an annulus inside it reducing the apreture?

You don't have to be finicky about the equatorial mount. Just set it to your latitude and aim roughly south. Doing so means that you have to use both slow motion controls instead of one - I've been doing it the slack way for decades.

As for the Huygens eyepieces which we all consider garbage nowadays, it's fun reading books from around 1900, where everyone is raving about the new Huygens eyepieces that were just coming out then, compared to the rubbish they had previously been using.
Regards,
Renato

[LewisM]

I noticed in Big W yesterday that they had dropped the price of the alt-az mounted Vivatar rebadge to $99 to compete with Aldi.

[Boozlefoot]

Put the money aside waiting for one of these, but I ended up with a 127mm Mak instead.

[gaseous (Patrick)]

Under a nearly full moon with moderate LP I set it up last night. I was initially pretty unimpressed with the finderscope, which has an aperture of about 23mm but is clearly stoppered down inside. My main gripe was with the dimness of the image and the poor focus, such that any sort of DSO was unviewable and reference stars were quite dim and slightly orange in colour, but I've since seen this morning that it actually has a turnable eyepiece for focusing, so strike one up for me being a dunce in that respect. Coming from an 8"-16" dob background, most views were going to be substandard to my eye (in terms of image brightness at least), but I've tried to keep the assessment an objective one. I probably wouldn't recommend this scope to anyone in a moderate to heavily light-polluted area, as the scope's light grab is a little too weak to overcome this problem, but the fact that you can pick it up in one hand and be viewing inside 60 seconds is probably going to be appealing to some people too.

The moon was nearly full and impressively sharp, both with the supplied eyepieces and my spare basic skywatcher plossls, although the first thing my son said while looking through the huygens was "why does the moon have a blue ring around it?"! There was a vivid electric blue rim around the full portion of the moon, but I guess some CA is par for the course with these eyepieces, although the actual clarity was better than I expected. Jupiter was dim, although at 70x mag (10mm EP) the bands and moons were visible if not terribly sharp. I tried with my ES 4.7mm which was at the theoretical limit for this scope, but there was no detail to speak of, so I'm thinking somewhere up to 100x might be the usable limit, at least under a full moon. This is probably a little low for planetary viewing, but for an entry-level scope I think showing kids the bands/moons of Jupiter is not at bad way to pique their interest in the hobby.

The supplied 1.5x and 3x barlows didn't get much of a run, particularly the 1.5x which is about 6 inches long - you're probably better off using a shorter FL eyepiece and avoiding any potential flexure in the focuser which I noticed. We found Omega Centauri, no thanks to the finderscope, and while it was dim with no resolved stars, I'm hopeful that better results may be had under moonless dark skies.

The Jewel Box was similarly dim, but at low power (28x - 25mm EP), the stars are surprisingly sharp across most of the field - they may have been sharp across the full field, but it was too dim to tell. The turnable lever controls are easy to use, even a 10 year old with no prior experience was able to keep Jupiter in the FOV with some judicious knob-tweaking. The focuser itself was a little stiff, and coupled with the lightweight nature of the mount made fine tuning a little tough, but under the light of day I'm expecting there will be some adjustment screws to loosen this a bit, or perhaps a liberal dose of WD40 may help.

For $100 I think this is a very good little scope, and under decent seeing conditions I hope it will perform even better. It gives quite nice low power views although you'd probably want to have some slightly better eyepieces to get the most out of it. If I'd received this as a kid I would have been very pleased indeed.

[xelasnave]

That sounds rather exciting.
I often get my hands on old guitars and enjoy getting the best I can from them...they have bad areas but usually you can play around that and get some fun out of them.
This scope sounds similar.
Sounds like go for low power and be content ...
My terrible 150 mm refractor shows colour around the Moon but you can still enjoy the detail.
Sounds like an ideal scope for someone thinking about getting into astronomy..if a one day (night) wonder you have only done a hundred bucks...if you get further in it sounds as if one could use it for something.

Put it this way I am under dark skies at the moment away from my gear and have only a 7 x 50 binos...this scope would be real handy.

I don't go to town until Tuesday (yet another trip re my damaged paw) so I may get one...sadly I return to Sydney the following day.

Thanks for the report I really enjoyed your post.
Alex

[Renato1 (Renato)]

Originally Posted by gaseous

Under a nearly full moon with moderate LP I set it up last night. I was initially pretty unimpressed with the finderscope, which has an aperture of about 23mm but is clearly stoppered down inside.

The trick is - if possible - to unscrew the front lens and remove the stop.
You will then find that the image in the finder no longer has nice sharp stars, but that because the image is much brighter, the finderscope is actually more useful for spotting DSOs.

And don't forget the old trick - when using straight finders, keep both eyes open. It makes getting a particular star into the finder so much easier.
Regards,
Renato

[xelasnave]

Getting it focused could be the first step.
Alex