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Thanks to the guys at Focus Scientific I now own this awesome telescope. I decided to write this review after my first night out with it. I was out for several hours and really love it. I was able to see many objects I've never been able to see/find before. When using a manual telescope, I'd look to where something should be and sometimes wasn't sure if it was the actual object or not. With the goto, it was clear to see what I was looking for and made viewing an incredible experience. The goto is perfect and centered everything I asked for everytime. The tracking is just as good. You can't even tell that an object is being tracked except that it's always in the eyepiece. There's zero jittering. I kept trying to see if I could feel/hear the tracking when it moved and couldn't at all. The alignment/setup is extremely easy. It asked me to locate and center the brightest star from a list. Finding Arcturus easily was the star I used. Then it provided a list of other bright stars to align to so I chose Polaris as another easy star to find. It slewed over to Polaris and I centered it in the eyepiece and that was it. The goto was perfect and always found the objects I asked it to find.
The tracking alone is awesome and the goto is just a huge bonus over the manual telescope. I spend way more time observing and letting the tracking do the job for me. Just by chance I was able to see the ISS go through my eyepiece twice while observing since I was spending so much time looking through the eyepiece. I do need a chair or something though because spending so much time hunched over the eyepiece made my back sore.
The only caveat was that the motors aren't powerful enough to lift the OTA when it's pointing close to the horizon without a little nudging to get the OTA a little higher. I do use fairly heavy 2" eyepieces though so that may not be an issue with lighter eyepieces. I do plan on adding some weight to the bottom of the optical tube to help with this. Moving the OTA by hand doesn't affect the goto/tracking at all as it keeps track of where the OTA is even when moved by hand. It does move without any issues with a 2" Nagler on the end along with the 2" 2X Powermate which together adds some significant heft as long as the OTA isn't almost horizontal. Like I said, adding some weight to the bottom of the OTA should alleviate this very minor issue.
The next thing I'm going to purchase will be the Southern Skies Sky Wire so I can use my iPad to control the telescope.
All in all, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this telescope to anyone. Awesome aperture, fantastic tracking and goto and it's an incredible telescope.
Rating:  [5 of 5 Stars!] |
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