Celestron Firstscope - an Official IYA 2009 Product!
(see the attached image, which is Copyright Celestron and borrowed from their website)
It's a 76mm reflector on the smallest and cutest dob mount you've ever seen! The Firstscope has a focal length of 300mm, and comes with 4 mm and 20 mm eyepieces that give you 75 x and 15x respectively. It has a brilliant little sturdy mount, and it just looks amazing!
I saw the add for this tiny dob in the latest mags, and immediately thought how cool it would be for my 10 year old son. I picked one of these scopes up today, and have had it out tonight for a quick test out before giving it to my son (probably) this weekend.
Here's the link to Celestron's site in case you haven't seen these advertised yet:
http://www.celestron.com/c3/product....=78&ProdID=568
So - having spent 30 minutes outside with it tonight, what's my initial opinion? I loved the concept of this scope - and I'm really disapointed to have to say that at this stage, if I can't improve it's performance I will be taking it back to return it.
This scope, at least the individual one that I've bought, has issues - serious issues - that may not be able to be resolved by tightening and or collimating things that need tightening or collimating. In fact so far it seems to NOT be user collimatable, not a good thing for a reflector. The back end of the scope shows no collimation screws, and it appears the only screws (on the sides of the OTA tube) would entirely remove the mirror cell. I have also already tightened a couple of things, like one of the screws that hold the bracket for the secondary mirror (a single arm bracket, not a spider).
It also appears to suffer chromatic aberation, ie it has purple fringing on bright objects. Unless this effect is being introduced by the ep's themselves (in which case they must both do it) then this scope must apparently have an inbuilt magnifying lens as per "department store" scopes and other "short tube" reflectors.
Even worse than the purple-tailed flaring comets that any stars become when viewed through this scope, is the fact that you can't even seem to achieve an accurate focus. And I don't mean a crisp solid focus on a star, I mean I couldn't seem to get a clear focus on Jupiter even at 15x! The effect was similar to looking through a pair of binoculars when one side is out of focus with the other - except of course this was happening through a single eye. I've not seen this effect before and can't explain it other than to say that jupiter, or even the region along the terminator on the moon, appeared to be both in focus, and out of focus, at the same time.
For now I can only say hold onto your $149 (which at that price does not include any kind of finder or aiming device, not even a red dot finder - you need the additional "accessory pack" to get a finder) until I can look at this scope more closely in the light of day to see what, if anything, can be done. Stay tuned.