Another ALDI telescope

[LewisM]

Next Saturday, ALDI will be selling a 76/700 (f/9) Newt on an equatorial mount for $99.95.

Could be worth a crack for the kids - it's another Nat Geo. I expect there will be lots of plastic, bad at best EP's and shake-o-matic mount and tripod but who knows - those little Dobs worked better than many claimed (I still have one for the girls here now repainted yellow and the image it gives with a cheap Plossl is not too bad!).

It's in their new catalogue in store, but not online yet, THOUGH you can JUST see a snippet of the scope in this page: https://www.aldi.com.au/en/special-buys/

[xelasnave]

Hi Lewis
Have you ever lined up.at Aldi on Saturday morning?
Its like a boxing day sale.
I cheat.
I take my walking frame and shuffle to the head of the mob.
But when the doors open they can run.
What fantastic marketing.
They have their regulars well trained.

I will get one...may make a great guide scope do you think?
Alex

[xelasnave]

I think it would be interesting to see what photos you could do with it...It may have a phone fitting...if not it should.
Alex

[Renato1]

Looking at the specs it has a low magnification of 28X, which means a 25mm eyepiece. And a high magnification of 233X which implies 6mm eyepiece Barlowed 2X. Though three eyepieces are pictured.

The Barlow is useless of course, as the power is too high.
But the 6mm eyepiece would give 116X, which isn't too bad, though a 5mm eyepiece would have been better.

And a 32mm eyepiece would have given a lower powered, wider field of view than the 25mm eyepiece, though 25mm is still okay.

If the eyepieces are Plossls it wouldn't be a bad buy for a newbie using say Tirion's Bright Star Atlas. If they are shocking Huygens eyepieces, then more cost will be involved buying replacement Plossls.

The big issue is the finderscope - is it a decent one or one of those stopped down ones, which give sharpish star images, but with lousy low light grasp (making it fairly useless except for on planets)?

One would have to open the box at Aldis to find out.
Regards,
Renato

[xelasnave]

I didn't get to go.
Alex

[Tropo-Bob]

I cheaply picked up something like this about 20 years ago, as a curiosity.

It wished that as a youth I had taken this option over the dept-store 60mm refractor. It gathered appreciably more light than a 60mm but had about the same resolution.

However, similar to the dept-store 60mm refractor, it needed better EPs and a better mount. (Back in the 1960s, Dept-store refractors actually came with decent finders.)

I gave it away to a co-workers son who was showing an interest in astronomy.

[gaseous]

The eyepieces appear to be Huygens, so you might as well bin them as soon as you open it, but for $100 it might be worth checking the scope out as a quick and dirty grab-n-go scope - you can always re-gift it to a non-favourite niece or nephew I guess.

[Boozlefoot]

My son recently inherited a 2nd hand one from a friend who couldn't see anything through it. Once it was collimated, we ran it with some old Celestron Plossl's with fairly respectable results (for a retail of $100.00.)

An ideal scope to buy. strip and use the parts for younguns to make their own steampunk truss scope?

[Boozlefoot]

[QUOTE=xelasnave;1325938]Hi Lewis
Have you ever lined up.at Aldi on Saturday morning?
Its like a boxing day sale.
I cheat.



Take your cat next time?:lol:

[5ash]

I purchased one of their 76mm dobsonian style scopes 2yrs ago , once the secondary was realigned with the eyepiece ( needed longer screws) and I'd removed the cell screws and configured a simple adjustment mechanism, I collimated it.gives nice low power views.
Philip

[xelasnave]

Who was it who surveyed the Southern constalations,with a half inch refractor
He would have liked one of these
Alex

[xelasnave]

Constellation s

[LewisM]

He had a LOT LOT LOT darker skies than today's light pollution destruction of the night sky.

[Nebulous]

I do not need another telescope...
I do not need another telescope...
I do not need another telescope...
I do not need another telescope...

If I say it enough times between now and Saturday I might just be able to resist the lure of an alleged bargain (the same scopes seem to go for quite a lot more elsewhere)..

I do not need another telescope...

I do not need another telescope...

I REALLY do not need another telescope, especially a dinky little one like that....

Looks kind of cute though..

I do not need another telescope...:rolleyes:

[gaseous]

Yeah, they appear to be $190 on special at Ozscopes (normally $275), so for $100 it's probably worth a shot. I'll convince my wife that our 10 year old NEEDS one for school...

[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.

[Tropo-Bob]

It would be wise to try the Hugens EPs anyway, coz they may work well at F9.
Sure the fields will be small, but when yours son's friends are over all eating sticky lollies and wanting to look through the scope, U may not want them to use your plossls.

[gaseous]

Well, that's true enough. The Huygens FOV seemed about 1/3 the plossl FOV (and they're only cheap plossls), so I'd rather sacrifice the Huygens to a greasy/sticky fate.

[Nebulous]

Hi Patrick,

To be honest, I wouldn't bother using the EQ capability of the mount initially. They can be fiddly to align properly and (unless you are using a motor drive to track and photograph a target) the pay-off is pretty modest. They can be a pain for a beginner to use. (In my experience anyway).

Fortunately it looks as if the mount on that kind of unit can be used quite simply as an Alt/Az for the first viewings - until such time as you feel like tackling the EQ stuff. (Apologies if you already know this ! :) )

1. Tighten the Latitude adjustment in position. For Alt/Az use, it doesn't matter whether you leave it at 0 or set it to your latitude.

2. Swing the scope over so that the counterweight bar is horizontal - i.e with the weight at one side and the scope at the other. Lock the clutch/knob that holds that axis in position.

3. You should now have a perfectly usable Alt/Az setup. The axis next to the tube itself does the up/down (either freehand or by locking it and using the adjusting knob). And the whole thing should rotate around the head of the tripod for the left and right. Much simpler for a newbie/youngster (or old fart like me...) to get the hang of.

I'd agree about not chucking the supplied eyepieces. To any youngster who isn't familiar with higher quality gear they should still give a half decent view while they learn the ropes (and maybe drop a couple too...). Save the better stuff for later. :)

Good luck with it - I'm sure you'll both have some fun . :)

Cheers,

Chris

[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.

[Nebulous]

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]

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.:shrug:

[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. 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]

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