Now, I read a lot of bad things about these scopes. The GOTO doesn't work properly, the focusser is poor, the built-in barlow is useless etc etc.
Maybe the bad press has had the effect of flooring my expectations, but my ownership has been hassle-free so far. Maybe I was lucky but I don't seem to have any of the problems above. Ok, so the barlow is poor, it's noisy and the slimmer tripod shipped with the Backpack edition isn't great. But none of those points are issues for me. The scope will sit quite happily on a garden table (or windowsill!) instead.
SPC900 & netbook were on hand so I thought I'd take a stab at planetary imaging with my ETX.. |
.. but despite excellent tracking, a short-tube achro is far from ideal for imaging Saturn! |
Saturn through my old LX200 for comparison. Much better! |
So that's my mini-review - to me it's a great grab 'n go which fits (in it's entirety!) into a little backpack and can be used to view a number of targets. The hand control can also be used for slow-motion AltAz tracking for terrestrial targets, which is handy too. I'll keep hold of it despite my efforts to set up an equatorial imaging platform.
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