Asto gear you wish you never purchased

[Daring Dave]

I assume Im not the only one who has purchased astro gear that ended up in the 'not suitable' basket... and subsequently on Ebay etc...

Was a good idea at the time ???? DUH !

The intention of this thread is not to bag any particular product or manufacturer but, given the enormous amount of gear available some of it...well...just doesn't give you warm fuzzies or live up to your expectations for one reason or another...

I guess its the 'money wasted' category....

I will start off..

60mm el cheapo refractor....Shocking quality but at least it started the astro bug Its been in the box for 2 years and I doubt Id get $20 for it..

Due to my inexperience I somehow ended up with a totally unusable 4mm Meade eyepiece off Ebay.... Completely unusable in my 8" dob ...The eye relief is zilch...

A collection of colour filters....I use 1 of the 8 I bought... Well I did a few times...

A 2 metre length of sonotube that never made it to a home made dob and 2 spiders....

Who else has some items that they wish they had never bought and why ???

[[1ponders] (Paul)]

Yep got a couple of those.
Even though I'm grudgingly using it at the moment, Meade Off Axis Guider. Exercise in frustration. Ok when it works but getting it to do what its supposed to Grrrr

You must have the same collection of filters I have. The only two useful ones, or the ones I like anyway, have flaws in them.

[ving (David)]

er... i generally arent too upset with my purchases, but I dont have many. I do have a 1.25" 32mm celestron EP that gets no use at all. it's not really too suited to my f6 scope but then it only cost me a 10er.
I bought a 60mm ebay refractor too. but I dont regret it at all. it showed me enought to get me hooked

[asimov (John)]

HMMM! Where do I start? TWO meade 8X50 finders [see Rowena's latest post]

The DK-3 dual axis drive unit I purchased for my refractor....Something went wrong with the hand-controller [a total melt-down actually] The same prob with TWO brand new units....I ended up with the old model synta unit instead. Still going strong. Perhaps I just had a run of bad luck??

Yep. A couple of EPs I bought hoping for 500 plus magnification when I was young & stupid ) 1X4mm/1x2.5mm

A 60 mm TERRESTRIAL refractor that I bought to use for astronomy....DEERRR!

The identical set of filters that daring-dave & paul bought! [never used]

[Starkler (Geoff)]

Members of this forum are luckier than newcomers doing it alone as we have a pool of some experienced observers here to ask for advice.
When I started out a few years back I did many hours of research on the internet reading a lot reviews and various yahoo forums and consequently haven't made too many expensive mistakes.

The ones I have made involve budget wide field eyepieces which simply dont cut it for me in an f5 scope. One I just sold for $45 originally cost me $140
Another eyepiece I just sold is a televue panoptic, which I just sold for exactly the same price I paid for it over a year ago.

The lesson is that quality gear holds its value and you almost always loose your money when you buy trash.

[toetoe (Peter)]

Sounds like those 60mm refractors were the go once upon a time.
No doubt i will buy something one day to put in the "wish i didn`t buy it" basket, but being able to get some good advice as well as options from other members i intend to buy with great care.

[Astroman (Andrew Wall)]

I would say the worst piece of equipment would be the 60mm refractor (I admit it was the 402x mag on the side) I used it all of 5 days I think. Although it didn't get me hooked it made me realise what a piece of *&^% it was.

Next one was a party built Observatory. Yep, I would have much prefered a finished dome so I could spend more time observing in it, than fixing it. Although it has given me a chance to learn new techniques in the building of these domes.

Also a set (6) of EP's that really are low quality, made me think there was something worng with my scope until I saw through it with a Nagler. WOW!

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

A Celestron C90. I originally bought it for terrestrial photography but at f11 the only pictures I could get were grainy using fast film. Since I already had a few larger scopes it was too small for astronomy visual use and again too slow at f11 for astrophotography. It just didn't fit any criteria. There's nothing wrong with it. But whatever it can do another scope can do better.

Then there's the 2 biggest booboos - a $1300 surveillance video camera and a $1000 camcorder. The surveillance video camera was an attempt at video astronomy. This was in 1993 and the camera is rated at 0.03 lux. Was the best technology could do at the time, only now it can be done for less than $100!

The camcorder I bought because of it's low light colour mode using slow shutter. I didn't realise a few days later that in that mode it's resolution was pathetic. Add to that many hot and dead pixels using slow shutter mode. Still I perservered and took some nice shots of the planets on SVHSC tape. Then the camera blew up just out of warranty leaving me with no way of playing all the super tapes! Not to mention all the daylight video I have now that's useless. I'm still bitter about that rotten thing.

At least now I have a Mintron video camera that does a fair job and isn't that expensive. Plus I bought a cheap Samsung video camera on sale at Kmart for 1/4 of the price of the other piece of #%$@& and it works great. Thanks JVC may you rot in the hot place.

My motto now is to buy cheap equipment cos all the expensive stuff blows up on me!

[acropolite (Phil)]

At this stage I have nothing (astronomical) I wouldn't buy again. I'm one of the members of this forum that Geoff mentions. I joined this forum knowing absolutely nothing and have been able to purchase carefully and with the confidence that I'm getting value for money, all thanks to the friendly advice of forum members and a bit of searching on the net. Thanks to the IIS members that offered advice...I can sympathise with Kevin on the camcorder though, I bought a Canon Hi8 camcorder in 94 (expensive) and have used it for probably no more than 10 hours and it's stuffed, annoys the hell out of me because I have no way to view the family memories that I have stored on tape...

[rmcpb (Rob)]

Mine wuld have to be the set of colour filters I would not be able to observe without. I think I have used the light blue one a few times but other than that the others stay in their nice little plastic container.

If I ever get a larger aperture scope then maybe they will be useful.

[jackenau]

I'm with Rob. The set of 4 colour filters that you must have, but you never seem to use.

Ken M

[Starkler (Geoff)]

Here i was contemplating buying a filter or two before the Mars opposition

[beren]

talking about filters two that come to my mind are my meade narrowband/broadband 1.25" LPR filters, they stay in the back of the case . and have probarly been used a handful of times

[Striker (Tony)]

Nope NO regrets....I just sell what I dont want.....lol

Although it wasn't purchased with my money, I have the displeasure of putting up with a C11 at our observatory, not the best thing Celestron ever produced.......or is it?

[iceman (Mike)]

I've read mixed reports about the C11 - it seems the C8 and C9.25 are generally much better performers.

I got those colour filters, used a blue one on Jupiter, once. Certainly not worth more than $2 each, in my opinion.

[GrampianStars (Rob)]

G'day Y'all
used once a Meade 1.25" 4000 series 6.0mm eyepiece
NO eye relief with an exit pupil too small even for micro collimation

[asimov (John)]

How much for the C11 nightshift? [$]