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I'm very new to astronomy and wondering what I can see with these specs, I honestly have no clue what a lot of these specs mean, and need help thanks.

Features:

Maximum magnification: 675x

Large aperture offers clearly illuminated views

Stable construction provides solid support and control

Metal tripod with slow motion control rod

Strong performance in both high and low magnification

Easy sky focusing with finderscope

Specification:

Aperture: 60mm (2.36inch)

Focal Length: 900mm.f/15

Finderscope: 5x24

Diagonal Prisms: 90degree

Slow Motion Control Rod For Easy Vertial Micro Adjustment

Height: 128cm

Standar: 0.965” Acceddoness Include

Eyepiece: SR4mm H12.5mm H20mm

3X Barlow Lens, 1.5X Erector

Telescopic Aluminum Tripod

it also cost $99, and also wondering if it's worth for the price here's a link to the site

http://www.dshop.com.au/buy/astronomical-telescope-675x-magnification/F90060M?gclid=CjwKCAjw-qbLBRB7EiwAftBCI7h_7lH3E9goJG4Top0N-OHaraxB0cM8IiZgfygRkHD8DZ1ThARCdRoCzA8QAvD_BwE

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5 Answers 5

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I know you didn't specifically ask this, but I feel it answers the spirit of your question. I'm just going to go through the list of features and specifications and explain what they mean.

Features

Maximum magnification: 675x

This should hopefully be obvious, but this claims to provide images that are 675 times larger that they would appear to the naked eye. However, don't get too excited about this number. When it comes to telescopes, the magnification power is not the most important number. Telescopes for amateurs will try to play off this ignorance though and very often talk about how good that telescope's magnification to make it sound impressive.

Large aperture offers clearly illuminated views

The aperture is the physical size of the collecting mirror/lens. Usually aperture size is specified as the diameter of the main mirror/lens and larger is better. A larger aperture means the telescope can collect more light and thus you can see fainter objects you couldn't normally see with your naked eye. The phrase "clearly illuminated views" doesn't really mean much though, its just marketing.

Stable construction provides solid support and control

I guess they're just telling you the telescope won't wobble on it's stand. Which is good. It would be hard to look at a fixed object in the sky while your telescope is wobbling all around.

Metal tripod with slow motion control rod

Not sure it matters that the tripod is metal or not. But they do say it has a "slow motion control rod". Basically, these are rods you can turn to move the telescope very slightly rather than swinging it with your hand. This just provides the ability to finely move the telescope to help point it precisely.

Strong performance in both high and low magnification

Pretty obvious statement, albeit a vacuous one. What counts as "strong performance"?

Easy sky focusing with finderscope

The telescope comes with a finderscope. You can see that as the small "mini" telescope attached to the main telescope. When trying to point your telescope at a specific star, it can be hard to know if you're pointing at the right one. The finder scope provides some basic ability to view a larger region of the sky and try to get your telescope generally pointed in the right direction. From there, you can look through the main telescope and use the "slow motion control rod" to get it pointed exactly right.

Specifications

Aperture: 60mm (2.36inch)

This is the aperture I mentioned above. They're telling you the diameter of the main lens. Bigger is better here because it means the telescope can collect more light and see fainter objects. That's why professional astronomical telescopes are constantly getting bigger and bigger. I'll note that they're probably playing mental games by saying its 60 mm when 6 cm would have sufficed. More than likely, 60 sounds more impressive than 6 which is why they chose to use mm.

Focal Length: 900mm.f/15

This tells you two pieces of information. First, that the focal length is 900 mm. This telescope is a Refraction telescope. The light enters the telescope and immediately hits the main lens. The main lens is curved and bends the light, focusing it to a point. This focused light it sent to the eyepiece which will then direct it right to your eye for viewing. They're telling you that the telescope focuses the light to the eyepiece over a distance of 900 mm.

The other quantity is the f-number. It is the ratio of the focal length to the aperture size. You can hopefully easily see that 900/60 = 15 and thus the f-number is written as f/15. The "/" here does not imply division, it's simply how the f-number is written.

To be honest, neither of these two quantities will really matter much for you. I think they're just quoted because they're common "optics" numbers you'd see with higher end cameras and they want this telescope to sound like a serious product. The only thing about this that affects anything for you is the field of view, that is how much of the sky you can see at one time. This will only matter when looking at extended objects like the Moon. A longer focal length means a larger field of view. The f-number is virtually useless for astronomical applications. It only really applies in photography.

Finderscope: 5x24

This is again the finderscope I mentioned above. It's used to get your telescope pointed more or less in the right direction so you can then look through your telescope and do fine pointing. The number 5x24 signifies that it magnifies by 5x and has a 24 mm diameter aperture. This is going to be cheap and may not focus very well so don't expect anything amazing. You'll only use it to point the telescope though so if you're fine with that then so be it.

Diagonal Prisms: 90degree

This is just the prism at the end of your telescope, and before the eyepiece, that let's the eyepiece be 90 degrees turned from the main telescope shaft. This is useful because you can sit next to your telescope and view through the lens on the side rather than having you align your eye directly with the telescope's main barrel. It just provides easier and more comfortable viewing.

Slow Motion Control Rod For Easy Vertial Micro Adjustment

Already described this above.

Height: 128cm

Just giving you the height of the telescope. Although it's unclear precisely what height this is. Certainly the height changes as you move the telescope around on the mount. Is this the maximum height? Is it the height when the telescope is level? Who knows.

Standar: 0.965” Acceddoness Include

I actually have no idea what this means. Clearly they misspelled Standard. Other than that, I don't know what an "Acceddoness" is.

Eyepiece: SR4mm H12.5mm H20mm

Just providing you with descriptions of the three eye pieces that come with this telescope. The measurements are the eyepiece aperture sizes. A larger size generally means higher magnification and higher field of view.

3X Barlow Lens, 1.5X Erector

There are two additional optical pieces provided. The first is a "Barlow lens". This will sit in front of your other eyepieces and serves to provide an additional 3x magnification. The second is the Erector lens. It will provide an additional 1.5 magnification but it also will "erect" your image. The optics of your telescope will flip your image upside down. This is just how optics works (and it's the same reason you appear upside down in a spoon). In truth, when looking at astronomical objects, it doesn't really matter if you're looking at it upside down or not, but cheaper telescopes like to provide the illusion of having fancy gadgetry like erector lenses. There's not much of a reason to flip the image to be "correct".

Telescopic Aluminum Tripod

It's just a basic metal tripod that lets you sit your telescope on a stable mount. The legs can adjust to different heights and are thus "telescopic" which has nothing to do with the fact that it is a tripod for a telescope.

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  • $\begingroup$ Google Acceddoness and you will find many Chinese websites specifying this when they mean Accessories included - and all with the Standar: typo ;-) $\endgroup$
    – user1569
    Aug 21, 2018 at 13:04
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You've already gotten some good answers in technical sense. Let me chip in and give some feedback on the usage of my own telescope and how it might compare.

Cost: AUD 99.95 (roughly USD 80 at time of writing). This is lower than I would be expecting to pay for a reasonable scope of this spec - as antlersoft noted, this is likely because of poorer quality components

Magnification: the 675x top number quoted is correctly calculated but does not take into account the practical ("seeing" or atmospheric disturbance) or theoretical limitation before you lose detail (check out http://www.telescope.com/Telescope-Power-Magnification/p/99813.uts for some information on this). 120x is a reasonable maximum for a perfect night's seeing.

The problem with the magnification statistic is that they are often highlighted by manufacturers who don't know or care about the real limits. To put this into context, I have a reflecting telescope with a 200mm objective and this is theoretically good up to 400x - however, I've never been anywhere near there because of "seeing". The best I've managed is 200x and this is quite rare.

The other problem with high magnification for this telescope is that it has a small objective lens and therefore limited light gathering capability so, as you increase magnification, the image becomes much dimmer very quickly.

You'll certainly see the Moon and it will probably look quite good in this scope. I often find the Moon uncomfortable bright in my scope and use a mask to artificially restrict my objective to something similar to this scope. It works well at 35x so your 20mm eyepiece (45x) would probably work well.

I normally use 110x for Jupiter, so the 10mm (90x) would likely work and I'd expect to see the banding on the planet and the four major moons.

I use the same for Saturn and the 10mm (90x) would probably get you to see the rings though I'm not sure how clearly.

However, all this is based on the assumption that the build quality is good - it's all a best case ... personally I would suggest going for a named telescope from a known brand. I see you've posted something in a separate question (Which telescope should I buy?) , so I'll post a suggestion there too.

Good luck.

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You can see everything you want in the sky, but for new astronomers there are some simple objects that are nice to look at:

  1. Moon (especially in 1/4 phase you will see craters with good shadows)
  2. Jupiter and its largest moons
  3. Andromeda galaxy (M31)
  4. The Orion Nebula
  5. Star Cluster Pleiades

You can see all of them without telescope, but once you use the scope it will make you a "big fan" of astronomy. Choose a dark night without fog or clouds and a place with minimum lights around. The best place is a high one in a desert.

*Very important! Don't ever watch the Sun, without a special filter! It will damage the eyes!

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As you say you know nothing about what a lot of the specs mean, it's hard to know where to start. Here are a few points.

Objective diameter 60mm: this is the diameter of the lens at the front (objective). The size of the objective determines how faint are the things that you can see. Under the right conditions (very dark and clear night sky) 60mm will show many great astronomical objects, but it is generally the smallest size you will see for astro telescopes. This is because the objective size also determines how much detail can be seen (again bigger is better), but also this is heavily dependent on the quality of the lens, and in a $100 telescope you shouldn't expect too much. This has a knock on effect on how much usable magnification you can get out of the scope. A rule of thumb is that the maximum usable magnification is about 50 times the size of the objective (in inches) - about 120 times in this case - assuming excellent optical quality.

Eyepieces: I suspect that only the H 20 and H 12.5 will be usable as the SR 4, giving 225 magnification) will just produce a blur (and anything in the night sky you look at will be very hard to keep track as the earth rotates). The optical design gives a narrow field of vie, and it is unlikely that you would be able to see the whole of the moon in the same field of view, which you may find disappointing.

Tripod: no detail is given, but at this price it is unlikely to be very stable (in other words wobble like a jelly).

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Previous answers are good; I will add:

Magnification is objective focal-length/eyepiece focal length.

The 3x barlow lens gives an effective focal length of 2700mm; that divided by 4 mm focal length maximum power eyepiece gives the advertised magnification of 675x. Usable maximum power for a 60mm aperture, though, is about 120x, so already the advertisement is lying to you.

The standard for amateur eyepieces is 1.25" diameter; .965" is used only for very cheaply made telescopes and eyepieces.

The eyepieces are indicated to be of Huygens and Symmetrical design, which are inexpensive designs with a limited field of view.

Judging by the specifications of the other components, the mounting is also likely to be very cheaply made.

Overall, this advertisement is telling you to "STAY AWAY"! I used such a telescope when I was a boy and it was an exercise in frustration.

Look for a beginner telescope from a reputable company that is honest about its capabilities, with fewer but more useful (and standard) accessories. You can find a 90mm reflector with a standard-sized Plossl eyepiece and a usable mount for about the same price, and it will result in a much more enjoyable experience.

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