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109 of 115 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good first scope, December 27, 2001
By A Customer
A caveat: I'm a complete novice, and this is my first telescope. Those more advanced may want to take this with a grain of salt, but I hope I can help other novices.On the advice of many here, I bought Terence Dickinson's "Nightwatch". It was well worth it; buy this book before buying a scope. I wanted to spend in the $500 range for a scope to prove to myself that I would use it and get a little experience. Others here suggested starting with a 6-8 inch Dobsonian, but I found that after everything tallied up I was closer to $1000. I'd rather start a little lower and then buy a really nice ($2k+) scope later. At the same time, though, I wanted to avoid a "trash scope". I decided on this scope over the lower end ETX Meade scopes because for the same price you get a larger aperture (114mm vs 70) and hence more light. Also, with a 1 meter focal length, you get larger magnification with less powerful eyepieces, giving you a better field of view. On my first pass, I discovered that the mirrors had come loose in the tube and shattered against each other. I returned it, and was told that several others had had the same problem. This disturbed me, but they had a replacement in stock, and all was well with that one. First off, the instruction manual is poor, and there's no packing list. It's not that tough to figure out what piece is what, but all the pictures in the manual are for the refractor in the same DS line, so they're not very useful to the beginner. Nevertheless, I was able to assemble it in less than an hour. Aligning the finderscope (6x30, which Dickinson calls "barely acceptable" but worked well for me) took another 30-45 minutes - I found the placement of the thumbscrews rather unintuitive, but perhaps they are all like that. The scope comes with a tripod which seems plenty stable, and a 25mm and a 9mm eyepiece. When I bought it, the electronic eyepiece was thrown in for free. All seemed to work well, though I did prefer the 9.7mm Plossl (sold separately) to the 9mm that came with the box. The scope was easy to use manually and gave me good views of the moon, sharp and clear. I'm in the middle of Dallas, and just used my back yard, and got surprisingly good (at least to me) seeing conditions. I was able to get to 100x power with no loss of clarity. Anything over that, though (a 2x Barlow and the 9.7 mm, or a standalone 6mm Plossl) was pretty much useless. My three gripes with the scope are the focuser, motor drive and the autostar controller. Perhaps this is normal, but the focuser isn't geared - there is no separate knob for fine adjustments. I found that when I changed eyepieces, I had to make slight adjustments to focus, and this was difficult with just the big focusing knob. There's a separate attachment which motorizes this, and that might help. Also, the scope quivers noticeably when you focus. This is more of a problem when you are moving the scope manually, and you have the locks off. I never lost the moon out of my field of view altogether, but I had to recenter almost every time after refocusing. The drive tracks smoothly left-right, but seems to stick at the beginning when going up-down. The result is that fine adjustments were difficult: you get nothing, then a jerk past where you wanted, and then smooth tracking. I haven't yet set up autostar to compensate for sidereal motion, so I don't know how big a problem this is going to turn out to be. My problem with the autostar is legibility. The text scrolls by reasonably quickly, and there seems to be some ghosting in the display, which combine to make the scrolling text pretty difficult to read. Luckily, aside from some text at the beginning (cautioning you not to look at the sun), this doesn't seem to be much of an issue. Despite this, I quickly learned how to compensate and was able to get around the problems, and once I had it was well worth it. On the whole, I feel like I got my money's worth, and like I avoided a trash scope.
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