I wrote a few weeks ago about a telescope I was planning to buy from a co-worker. It is a Bushnell Voyager 4.5 in reflector. Well, I decided to go ahead and buy it. Looking at ebay, the $100 I paid for it looks to be about street price, but as Chuck mentioned, probably a bit steep for the scope. But compared to what I previously had, it's definitely a step up. I've had it out on a couple of occasions now in my backyard in Orem, and it's been fun to use a better scope than whatI've personally owned before. Particularly nice for me are the fine-tune Dec/RA adjusters. On my older scope these were non-existent, so it was a game of 'find the object in the spotter scope, then hunt around by man-handling the tube while looking through the eyepiece, and find it if you're lucky.' On the new scope it's find it in the finder, then star hop with the fine-tuners until you get where you want to be. So that's nice--for me anyways. The scope is generally good quality. I believe the tube is aluminum or some other metal. There is some vignetting as Chuck mentioned. Perhaps I can find a different secondary mirror to fix that problem. The focuser mechanism is one of the weaker points of the scope. My old scope had much smoother focusing than this one. After opening up the focusing mechanism on the new scope it looks to be a metal gear in a plastic track. The focusing movement is rough at best. Perhaps I can try some graphite or something to smooth it out. The finder scope is probably the weakest point of the whole scope. If you use the trick of keeping both eyes open while hunting an object in the finder scope until the object meets itself in both eyes, this finder is strange that the object doesn't meet itself at the meeting of the crosshairs, like other scopes I've used. Strange. The scope came with three low-quality eyepieces, a 20mm, a 12mm, and a 4mm, with a 3x barlow magnifier. I think I'd like to eventually pursue some of Chuck's designs for homemade eyepieces. All in time. At any rate, despite its defects the scope meets my needs for now, although finding the ring nebula rather dim in Lyra last night only whetted my appetite for more aperature :-). Being able to actually find and identify the nebula is a step up for me though... Fwiw, -- Dan Hanks
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hanksdc@plug.org