Telescope EQ Astronomical Telescope

This telescope is my Childhood Dream Scope! I am almost 70. Back in the 1960s the most common way to get into astronomy was to aim for a 6" F8 mirror, starting with grinding your own. Edmunds Scientifiic sold mirror kits and you supplied the elbow grease. Anything smaller than that was considered "meh" unless it was a 7X50 binoculars and a sky free of city lights. That form ended up being the kind I pursued as it was the most portable and required some persistence at collecting what was owed from my paper route clients who always stiffed me (along with the paper boss). I still have my mirror blank which I think I ground to about an f30 curve. I did not have a good setup for grinding and polishing.We paid less than $300 for a prime Day purchase of this thing, as an early birthday present. The scope itself is a fast F5. With the large FL eyepieces the field of view is large and with an older 34mm Plossl the field of view was 5-6 degrees. The moon itself was low in the sky and a little bit attenuated by some high altitude smoke. This actually contributed to a high degree of color contrast. This was without the moon filter. Actually it was without anything else other than the core telescope. One can probably hold this in one's arms using a guitar strap and an lower power eye piece and see some amazing star fields if the sky is dark enough, such as is found in the SE part of Oregon, or the northern California Coast where I am heading later this summer. One could easily adapt the tube as well as the tube holder to a simplified Dobsonian mounting. Basically the core telescope seems about perfect at that price. Throw in the filters, the selections of eyepieces, and then the lens cap with the smaller cap for a solar filter (I am eager to try this!) and its like WOW!The tripod seems roust enough. At full extension it ended up being too high for me and was a little less stable but for this size of scope its massively overbuilt (this is a good thing). The various plastic handled axle locks etc. are a little flimsy feeling but easily upgraded by replacement with a more serious design. I will get around to this later on. Setting the primary axis to the exact truse north at tis latitude will be an easy task with the T-handled screw. However, once set it could be locked. I haven't fojnd a way to do this yet. Its not a big deal. The fine control worm gear drives are great and the flex shafts are another good start and something someone clever could improve upon. Again this is the overkill exception in the 1960s amateur telescope context. The thing is that one is already starting with an amazing piece of equipment.Here's the thing. The base and mount could hold something larger even. They might consider adding an aftermarket 8" or even 10" RFT with a similar quick mounting. I have an 8" mirror and diagonal and will build that out. 12" would even work if the mirror was F4 which is really steep. The main point of going larger would be to see fainter objects.This is a fools errand near Seattle where I live. There are filters that remove street light frequencies and other strategies. The main thing is to be able to see something like the nebula in Orion glow like a neon light. Its amazing with a 10" scope and a 34mm Plossl eyepiece. Magnify light - not resolution - to see these things.The mount would adapt well to a clock drive. However, the iPhone mount makes it possible to collect and stack digital imagery, filter out the street lights and produce some amazing results that could be useful in the scientific community, such as the shearing off of comet tails, and other faintly presented but dynamic processes. One can also figure out exactly when and where the ISS will be passing in front of the sun and moon and capture that on video. The telescope could also be slewed in a sling and your eyes can see this object's shape as it rapidly passes overhead. I actually did this with a 10" RFT that I recently decommissioned. Its so amazing that one can see this.As a starting point at the regular sale price this scope is a great point of origin. I suspect the company making these cannot make them fast enough. Except for the modular larger scope possibility, there is no need for them to accessorize as one can find eyepieces, view finders, etc. elsewhere easily. Until it is tested and vetted I would exercise some caution before using the solar filter. Replacing that with something robust would perhaps be a safe route. One can also get a sharper view of planets at higher resolutions by leaving the dust cover on exceptr for where the solar filter would go. This is an old trick. I have no problem with this being made out of plastic. Testing will determine if the iPhone holder works and perhapssome accessorizing in that department to fit it to a better camera such as my Canons and Nikon point and shoots would be great. The iPhone actually has 4-5 different lenses and I am not sure which one is the one to use!Bottom line - this is a wonderful choice and made well enough. Its also way better than what the average kid into astronomy could muster way back when we were all inspired by the Mercury to Apollo Program. These days we are equally inspired by the JWST and everything else. The TikTok STEM scientists help make it that much more exciting. The price point - especially on the dreaded Prime Day - is simply shocking!What may be needed if it doesn't exist would be an ebook or website community showing how many start with this scope and the ways they personally chosse to improve it, using cleverness, 3D printed parts, off the shelf components etc. I might have to pursue such a thing eventually though I should let someone with many more years to live and a better social media sense else pursue this, while I finally get to do some reasonable astronomy myself. If I write anythingon a blog on Substack, I will post the link in a future review.Thank you to Amazon for your part. The scope arrived very well packed and protected in similar fashion to how Elegoo or Snapmaker ships off their 3D printers ortable top CNC machines.

The telescope was much easier to setup than I thought it would be. I was done in about 20 minutes. The only issue I have is the red dot finder is not properly aligned with the tube, so to get things in the eyepiece I actually have to put the red dot finder about an inch off to the right side of the object, and slightly below. Otherwise I love it.It came already collimated and after travelling with it to the observatory for classes and back home it is still collimated. I bought a laser collimater with the scope because I thought I would need it, based on what people were saying generally. But you can ignore that. After you check and you need it, then get one.When I add a 3x Barlow lens with the 25mm eye piece, I can see rings of Saturn and the moons around Jupiter. Not to mention the moon in stunning detail. Venus is extremely bright, but I can see the curvature of the planet. Mars and Mercury just look like stars.I highly recommend that you learn how to align the scope and set your Ascension and Declimation. After this is set, you only need to use one of those levels to follow any object is space. Which is great.I’m experimenting with filters to see whether I can get a better look at nebulae, so I’m not going to talk about out those. You can see some of them, but they are hard to make out since they just look like an area of grey mist against the blackness.Recommended. For everything except nebulae.I recently bought a zoom eye piece and can’t wait to see Saturn at the higher 7mm magnification.The cellular phone adaptor did not work well for me though. I lock it onto the eye piece, but it would usually fall off again.It’s a very good telescope

I am writing a review on the 150EQ Astronomical Reflector TelescopeI have to give this Telescope a rating of 1, because this is NOT 150MM, it has a 130MM refractor lens. Claiming this to be about a 6” refractor lens is dishonest since it is about 5”.I bought this telescope over others that advertised at 130MM but as I said, this one measures 130MM and not 150MM.I found out exactly how large the reflector mirror is because of my second issue that needed me to removed the reflector lens and add a center dot.ALL Newtonian reflector telescopes HAVE to be collimated. To collimate you need to have a dot in the exact center of the reflector lens.My issue is why did the manufacturer not put a dot in the center for us?Okay, you will need to remove the reflector lens and with great effort add a dot or some other permanent mark on the exact center of your lens. (it was at this point I measured my lens and found it was about 130MM, about 5 1/8 inches in diameter (not 150MM or 6 inches).To avoid needing to Collimate your telescope then buy one where the eye pieces is near the back end of the telescope, this telescope has the viewer/eye piece near the front end and requiring the mirror that needs collimating.We ended up buying a second telescope that had the rear eye piece area and was 90MM.We still have not figured out how to actually seem Jupiter clearly like picture we see and have not found it’s moons either, same for Saturn.We have not been able to find neptune or Uranus and any of the nebulas like we wanted to either. We also expected to be able to find the Andromeda Galaxy even.My hope is that Amazon will verify what I am saying and force the sellers of this telescope to change their descriptions to the truth.

About what I expected. Very pleased it does not have .0965" eyepieces which are low quality and cant easily be added to with more eyepieces in the aftermarket. The K eyepieces are okay and have less lens elements to penetrate which can be a good thing. The only drawback to the eyepieces are a narrow field of view. (about 40 degrees) Two things I did not like are that the tube has a length wise seam and the focuser has what appears to be a lot of plastic. What I did like is that the tripod legs are very sturdy with a little weight. Slo motion controls work smoothly and it comes with setting circles and anodized red metal on many surfaces like focuser knobs etc. (night vision) The counter weight is heavier than I imagined but I may use another scope on this mount so that is a good thing. Optically, this is an almost exact size that a Boeing engineer gave me as my very first telescope so Iam happy with the size and ability. It has some type of solar filter that I will never use. (solar viewing should be done by projection only) I would like to add that a friend of mine at work set up a Newtonian facing the sun in his A Frame and forgot to cap the mirror which resulted in him "smoking" a wood beam on his ceiling. A mirror this size will effortlessly light a cigarette so you can imagine what it would do to an eyeball with direct viewing of the sun. So far overall the quality is much better than expected. The directions are easy step by step but I did not need them. Took me longer to unpack than it did to put together.

I did a fair amount of research and came to the conclusion that this telescope was the right one for me. I've never had a telescope and even worried this might be too advanced...but it was just right. It's well made, high-quality, sturdy, and didn't take that long to put together. It does take some time and effort to put together (I had read horror stories on the Internet about other telescopes), and some steps did take some thinking (instructions are minimal), but I got it put together correctly the first time. I think anyone can do the same. I did have to watch a few YouTube videos on how to use telescopes in general, which were helpful (there are tons)...just to get the basics down and learn how to use a powerful telescope (things like lighting conditions, placement, focusing, etc.). But by the first night, I was seeing moons around Jupiter and other planets! They weren't huge, but you could see them. My family and friends had a great time. My wife loves it. It's just perfect. We've bought a bunch of books on things to see in the night sky and it's really added a cool new dimension to our lives that we love. We've been actively using it for weeks now, excitedly waiting for the night and clear skys. I did reach out to the company a few times using email to ask a few questions and they always quickly got back with answers and suggestions. You read stories on the Internet about telescope vendors not responding. This is not that type of company. I could not be happier.