Return of the Garbage Scopes

It wasn't too long ago that the market for telescopes wasn't too bad. There were still garbage scopes being sold, but the general quality of telescopes being sold under brand names wasn't very bad. At least, they weren't selling scopes so bad that they should be treated as a violation of the customer's trust in their name.

That time has come to an end.

Lately I have finally had a chance to re-engage with beginning astronomers. I was "away" for a few years because I made a cross-country move. Now, I am back to being active in community astronomy. I am in a great astronomy club, I am working with beginners in selecting and using new telescopes, and looking forward to the end of the pandemic so that we can start doing things in groups in person again--right now it's practically all via Zoom or other virtual meetings.

When I started looking at what is being offered at the low end of the price range, I will admit that I was shocked. Telescope designs that have no business being sold as astronomical telescopes are everywhere. They are being sold under brand names. They are being sold by what were formerly reputable dealers. There are dealers I used to send people to because I felt safe that those dealers wouldn't sell the people a piece of junk, who are now featuring absolute crap among their products. Not only has the garbage come back onto the market, much of what is being sold now is worse than the garbage that was being sold 30, 40, even 50 years ago.

The junk is not even being confined to a single line.
I can't tell someone "buy one of the Celestron XYZ scopes, they're all OK", or, "Meade's ABCs are all pretty good for the price." There are no safe product lines among the low end scopes.

So, I have felt motivated to start posting to this blog again to try to combat the tsunami of garbage on the market. New astronomers are the most vulnerable to the disgusting and predatory sales practices that foist worthless, unusable junk upon them. Their interest is honest, but their skills to use the tools of astronomy, and their ability to evaluate them, are very limited. They rely on things like brand names to let them know they're buying a decent product. They rely on product descriptions to tell them what an instrument is capable of. Current products, and the ad copy and "specifications" published for them are not just misleading, they pervert the very intent of having published specifications. They ignore the inadequacies built into the telescopes being touted to pretend that they can achieve some abstract level of performance used for the published capabilities and specifications.

I'm angry. And I'm going to call out their crap.

Stay tuned. But...trust no vendor selling a scope under $500 U.S. unless you know enough that you don't need someone on the internet to tell you what works and what doesn't.

My New Stellarvue SV110ED Telescope

I bought myself a new Stellarvue telescope for my birthday this year, an SV110ED, which is currently on sale and a tremendous value.

Stellarvue's telescopes are my favorite commercially manufactured telescopes, bar none. And my new scope makes me feel that even more so.

It's a replacement for my 8" Newtonian for personal use. My 8" Dobsonian will still be my scope for public star parties.

The performance of this telescope easily meets the theoretical maximum for a scope of this size in terms of resolution in its images. Double stars at 1.05 arcseconds resolve cleanly as two distinct points. When the sky clears up, I'm planning to see how well it does beyond theoretical limits. (It's worth mentioning that theoretical limits are not hard physical limits on performance. The Dawes Limit assumes a number of things about the optics and the light. This is why it's possible to have a telescope exceed theoretical limits in its actual performance.)

Not only is resolution excellent, but the contrast is fantastic as well, making this scope create amazing images of deep sky objects for a telescope of its aperture.

I'm very happy with this telescope.

The Mount
The mount for this scope was a bit of a compromise for me. I don't like computerized mounts. However, I want a clock drive so that the telescope will track the object I'm looking at when I use high powers (and if any scope is suited for high power observation relative to its aperture, it's this one.) These days, that pretty well means you get a computer. Stand-alone clock drives are available, but they're not the norm.

I decided to go ahead and take the plunge. I got a Celestron AVX mount from Stellarvue with my new telescope. It's got a computer.

Fortunately, the computer is easy to start up. If you aren't particularly concerned about alignment, or are willing to do a coarse alignment mechanically, you can just start it up with your last settings and skip any calibration procedure. Calibration procedures are the Great Wall that computer driven mounts erect between the observer and the sky.

If you do decide to calibrate, however, the AVX computer's calibration is not too onerous, and is fairly flexible in terms of selecting visible stars. These computers have come a long way.

So I think I can live with the computer.

The mount itself is a German Equitorial Mount. That means heavy. The tripod itself is quite heavy, as is the counterweight and the mount head itself. That means that moving this scope out under the stars is more of a chore than a simple alt-az mount would be. That's the cost of sky tracking, I guess. However, this mount will also support my desired future upgrade to my SV110ED, the SV115 Apo Triplet. So again, I can live with it.

I made one little addition to the telescope's mounting rail, barely visible under the scope tube in the image above. I added a bumper to keep the telescope from sliding through the dovetail. It sits on the sky end of the dovetail mounting rail. So if I have the mount dovetail pointing skyward when I put the scope into it, I don't have to worry about the scope sliding through and onto the ground if I fumble a bit in the dark. Here's a closer image, with an arrow pointing at the bumper:

Now I want more two inch eyepieces...