Customer Reviews

Bushnell Voyager Sky Tour 114mm Reflector Telescope

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

As a proficient amateur astronomer, I was given an opportunity to play with this telescope at a friends house. My conclusion: it's not worth the money.

Here's why:
- only the azimuth axis has fine-tuning, there is NO fine tuning on the altitude axis! This is a serious design flaw which makes tracking any celestial object difficult to impossible. (the telescope has an alt-azi mount, not an equitorial mount).
- the telescope is unbalanced, i.e. when the altitude brake is released the telescope immediately drops the mirror end and points upwards. It requires support by hand to guide the telescope to the correct altitude.
- the tripod is light weight and has poor (as in no) vibration dampening properties. Combined with the akward distribution of weight in the telescope, any time you touch the telescope it vibrates wildly without settling down quickly (any gust of wind was easily detectible).
- the supporting eye-pieces are poor, they include 12.5, 9 and 4mm, but at these combinations, the resulting magnification is so high that the poor dampening of the tripod removes any chance of comfortably viewing any celestial object. The inclusion of the barlow (2x) lenses is just plain silly, a recommended combination of supporting eye-pieces would have been 25mm, 12.5mm and maybe 9mm.
- the azimuth and altitude dials have illumation (which is nice) but the reference points are hard to see, making them nearly useless. Also there is no dial to adapt the level of lighting.
- the optics looked OK, but the conditions where poor so I could not determine their true quality.

The one thing I thought was innovative was the spotter scope, it uses an interesting approach to finding celestial objects using a red dot projected onto a lens. Unfortunately the spotter scope darkens the surrounding sky making it only applicable to the brightest of stars and planets.


My overall conclusion is that this telescope is not well thought out. It will provide a challenging and annoying experience when used to look at celestial objects. I would recommend against purchasing this product and look at better brands like Meade, Celestron, etc... These established brands are more expensive but certainly a lot better in overall workmanship.

I'm not even qualified to call myself an "amatuer" astronomer, but can easilly spot the flaws in the scope. I recieved it as a gift, and am sad it can't be returned. The biggest pain is that it's not balanced and has no elevation fine tuning. When you loosen the knob to change the elevation the telescope rapidly falls and points straight up! Pretty tough to find anything when you're constantly having to hold the telescope from falling and looking through the cheap plastic viewfinder at the same time! Do yourself a favor and look elsewhere!

My wife received this scope for 20 years of service as an employee. She re-gifted it to me since I am interested in astronomy and have been using binoculars in our backyard to learn. I was immediately aggrevated by the poor design of the vertical adjustment which doesn't have fine tuning like the azimuth adjustment. You are constantly wrestling with the vertical adjustment as it is not balanced properly. The 12.5 mm eyepiece is good; I saw the moon in great detail as well as Jupiter and its moons. The 8mm eyepiece is fair; I could make out the stripes on Jupiter. The 4mm is junk; I could never get it to adjust without looking fuzzy. You need a lot of patience to use this scope, but I'll use it until I can get something better; I don't think it will last that long since i am trying to tighten the vertical adjustment so much. I also had to modify the mount on the finder scope as it didn't line up properly; once I did the modification it worked fine. Overall I would not recommend this scope as it is way overpriced for what you get. This Orion and Celestron scopes seem much sturdier for the money; at least I didn't pay for this one. I plan to got to local star parties to compare scopes and purchase something nice from my evaluations.

This thing is impossible to use. If you do manage to find something with it, you can look at it for about one minute until it drifts out of view. Then spend another ten minutes searching for it. The altitude lock doesn't even hold the scope in place because it's so badly out of balance. I got mine as a gift, and the only reason I haven't donated it to Goodwill is because I'd feel guilty about someone else paying $20 for it.