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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.
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