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Paul_R
Carpal Tunnel
Reged: 04/05/05
Posts: 1648
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Intelliscope questions--2004 S&T review (LONG)
05/09/08 08:14 AM
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I've been getting interested in buying an 8" Intelliscope. I read Sky & Telescope's November 2004 review (pp. 86-91) and had several questions, especially about whether certain problems have been fixed.
1) Optics. They indicated that the mirror was good for low power, but suffered at higher power. "you get what you pay for" was how they put it (p. 90).
2) They found that the object locator was fast but "not highly accurate" (p. 91).
3) They also found that the locator "works well only when the telescope is on hard ground" (p. 91), that "a grassy lawn was too yielding a surface" (p. 89), and recommended observing from a patio or driveway.
4) They warned that "when putting the tube back on the mount, it's easy to bang and damage the altitude encoder" (p. 91).
5) They found that the scope does not balance well and, to compensate, they had to tighten the altitude knob so much that the motion became "unpleasantly jerky" (p. 91). They also had to add a counterweight. The picture of a rock rubber banded around the tube is disturbing!
6) The azimuth motion was poor, though they improved it by sanding the pads and then polishing them. After doing that, they still graded the motion only a B+!
Never having seen one, and after reading such comments, you can understand that this review gives me pause. I'm hoping that the scope they reviewed was a "lemon" or that, in the 3+ years since the review came out, Orion has improved things.
I'd be interested in hearing from Intelliscope owners (any size scope) and others about these issues. Are recent 8" Intelliscopes free of these issues? Or, would a new 10" Intelliscope be a better choice?
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