Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsGreat telescope for beginners
Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2019
Great telescope for a full year now. I brought the 5'' because it fits my budget and is much more portable than the 6" & 8".
The telescope arrived in two boxes and was packaged well. It was quite easy to assemble and was straightforward. But the first night when I tested it the red dot finder failed and would not turn on. I contacted product support and they refunded the price of the red dot finder to let me buy another. I think this is reasonable.
The telescope was of good quality and was fairly portable in two pieces. I also brought it with the Nex-yz adapter and eyepiece kit. In my opinion, I would not buy the phone adapter and eyepiece kit because I don't use the adapter and eyepiece often. You will pretty much only use the moon filter, 13, 17, and 32mm eyepieces. I also brought a generic LPR filter which helps somewhat in revealing dim objects and filtering out the light pollution
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The goto function was really helpful in finding objects especially DSO's. I will use the auto 2 star alignment procedure and manual location settings.
This scope was fine for starting astrophotography but exposures can only be limited to 30 seconds maximum. Even though there was a polar alignment option, it was really hard to do since I am living quite close to the equator in Hong Kong and the mount twists into a really weird position when tracking.
In the first few months I viewed only from the city, which was a bortle 9 scale. The planets are easy to see, you can see the belts of Jupiter and its moons, and the rings of Saturn easily. If you want a telescope for ONLY the planets, I would recommend some of the scopes without go to like a dobsonian or maktusov because you will be able to see more detail with increased aperture. You don't need go-to because planets are really bright and sometimes the mount will go off track. The Orion Nebula can be seen though only the bright parts. The andromeda galaxy can NOT be seen at all in light polluted places.
Later I was able to go out to a better spot ( bortle 5 ) and it was excellent, and I was able to see the double cluster, Orion Nebula and andromeda galaxy a lot better.
I would recommend this scope to beginners and people starting astronomy. You can get good results in the middle of the city, but driving to a deep sky site really makes the view impressive. I will not recommend this for astrophotography but instead will recommend scopes with German equatorial mounts.
* images are taken with A6000 camera with remote control.