Amazon Prime Day Deal on entry level telescope

[AmbulanceDriver]

Been eyeballing this scope for a while, so when I saw it was going to be one of the Prime Day deals, was pretty stoked.  Nice scope, mount, and tripod for under $100 for the next few hours.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0000Y8C2Y/

[dogmush]

Is that better than the 127mm one on the same page? All things being equal I thought more aperture was better?

[Regolith]

Is that better than the 127mm one on the same page? All things being equal I thought more aperture was better?

Yes. However, 13mm is generally negligible enough that if the 114mm were cheaper I'd say get it anyway, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.


Though I'm kind of wondering about that 127mm. It has a 1000mm focal length despite having a shorter tube than the 114mm, which has a 900mm focal length. That means that the light may be being bounced around a bit more between the aperture and the eyepiece than in the 114mm one, which means you have more opportunity for loss of brightness, which may negate any advantages you get from the larger aperture.

[bedlamite]

I did some looking earlier tonight, and most sites say the 127EQ is the best scope you can get under $200. It's only real drawback is that it requires collimation, which isn't that bad once you figure it out. I ended up ordering one.

[AJ Dual]

We got our daughter the 127mm one for Christmas. The optics are pretty good. You can see a decent disk and the bands on Jupiter even in muggy summer soup air. And I didn't bother to collimate it yet.

The plastic aiming/spotting scope is flexible to the point of being useless. And the German EQ mount and tripod are pure chinesium.

But overall, we can see the moon, Jupiter, Saturn, and crescent Venus etc. Good to go for the money.

[AmbulanceDriver]

I had actually ordered the 127mm first, but cancelled and switched to the 114 after doing some research. The reason for the short tube on the 127 is that it's a Bird-Jones design, which uses a doubler lens in the focuser assembly to make the 500mm tube an effective 1000mm focal length. The problem is that it's much harder to properly collimate, and uses a spherical primary mirror instead of a parabolic mirror, which causes a slightly poorer image quality.

[KD5NRH]

The plastic aiming/spotting scope is flexible to the point of being useless.

Green laser FTW.  And/or mount some cheap Picatinny rail and get a red dot made for .22s.

And the German EQ mount and tripod are pure chinesium.

https://www.cloudynights.com/topic/117633-stiffening-an-aluminum-tripod/#entry1543311

Get the tripod solid, and Celestron's equatorials aren't half bad.  I've got some 30 minute exposures done with a piggybacked DSLR using their cheap clock drive that came out excellent.  Even a couple with a 300mm zoom that had negligible shake and drag, though the 50mm f/1.7 was amazing for light gathering ability.
For cheap refractors, there's a post somewhere on CloudyNights about building a wooden tripod and mount that makes even the department store junk pretty usable.  I may still have one that I built for a $5 garage sale 50mm that actually made it worth carrying out to the field.  If you put the pivot point right around the eye level of the shortest person using it, it's a lot easier to use too.

And here's a 76mm reflector with a tabletop mount for $50: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Celestron-21024-FirstScope-Telescope/11714573
1.25" focuser, so finding quality eyepieces and camera mounts is a lot easier than the tiny department store ones, too.  Tabletop mounts are, of course, only practical if you have somewhere to put them, but a relatively level car hood will work, and not depending on spindly aluminum legs removes the biggest issue of cheap scopes.
Heck, for that matter, if you run across a good price on a mirror blank and primary cell, the focuser and secondary mount are probably good for building a much larger scope.