Quote:
Originally Posted by julianh72
My first telescope was also a 50 mm "department store" refractor, but in my case, it was "good enough" to show me things I couldn't see with the naked eye, and to convince me that I wanted to see more!
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Some can indeed be good enough. I bought a Celestron Powerseeker 50, 50mm refractor from Dick Smiths about 5 years ago for $36. I bought it out of idle curiosity. It was hard to use, till I loosened up the mount a bit, with some sand paper.
But I was quite surprised, it gave clean images of Jupiter and Saturn, without the flare and gross chromatic aberration that I had been expecting. It was better than the long tube 90mm Meade Achromat I mentioned below.
I suspect that a beginner who knew how to find planets would have been very satisfied with that $36 expenditure. Plenty of his or her friends would have been wowed by those images.
Seeing that it was half okay, I bought one for my then young nephew to muck around with, who lives on a ten acre property surrounded by lots of other 10 and 20 acre properties. He said it was very good, especially for looking at the distant neighbour's backyard and seeing all "those naked persons".
Regards,
Renato