#G494 VIVITAR TELESCOPE FULL#

The TravelScope 70, which I have also reviewed, is a nice little telescope if (and only if) you can put it on a good sturdy photo tripod. Though I would recommend going for the $60-70 Cometron FirstScope version rather than the default version, as the Cometron comes with much better eyepieces. There are no telescopes I would recommend for $40 or less, but for about $50 there is the Celestron FirstScope, which despite its soft optics has better resolution than the Vivitar, has a nice wide field of view for scanning the sky, has a large aperture to gather plenty of light, and has a very sturdy and easy to use tabletop dobsonian base. I do not recommend department store refractors, because many of them are bad for the same reasons the Vivitar Telescope is bad, it’s just that the Vivitar Telescope is a parody of the department store refractor. Almost any department store refractor you buy is likely to have a passable achromatic doublet lens. A pair of $30-50 binoculars are better than almost any telescope below $100, and they are vastly superior to the Vivitar Telescope.īut make no mistake, though there are many cheap refractors that are terrible, the Vivitar is one of the worst. 50mm objectives are enough to gather plenty of light for deep sky objects (galaxies, nebulae, and star clusters), and can show nice wide star-fields, without being too heavy to hold. A photo tripod and a tripod adapter can allow you to choose 10x-20x magnifications as well. You can choose which magnification you want based upon whether you want stable, wide-field views, or slightly shaky higher powers that give you the opportunity to examine features on the Moon. The tripod was acceptable when used on a table, the images were passable, and the eyepieces were pretty good for their type.įor the same price as the Vivitar Telescope, you can get a pair of 7x50, 8x50, or 10x50 binoculars. But I found that telescope to be actually quite usable and showed nice images of the Pleiades, the Moon, and Jupiter’s moons. In theory, it should have all the same problems: It’s a small 40mm refractor with a cheap tripod and Huygens eyepieces. Not long ago I used a similarly-priced toy refractor, which is sold under a number of names including the Discover with Dr. You know that classic science demonstration where you take two magnifying glasses of different focal lengths, and you put them in a cardboard tube and turn that into a telescope? Essentially, what Vivitar has done, is they’ve taken a small magnifying glass lens, put it in a plastic tube, and packaged it with some horrible eyepieces and a toy tripod. However traditionally, the department store refractor has at least had an acceptable objective lens, a coated or multicoated achromatic doublet, which was at least technically capable of forming good images, if all other concerns of mounting and eyepieces could be taken care of. These are typically hobbykillers because they can have frustrating mounts which make it difficult to find anything, and they have tiny, distorted eyepieces. They’re typically small thin little refractors on wobbly undersized tripods with mediocre eyepieces and overly high magnifications. Us telescope enthusiasts have been waging a war against the “department store refractor” for about as long as you could go to a department store and buy a telescope. Even stargazing with the unaided eye will bring you more joy. If you own this telescope and you think you like it, I am begging you to scrape together even the additional $40 for a cheap pair of 10x50 binoculars, you will be much happier. My general policy is that though I may point out the flaws in a telescope, if you have a telescope that I don’t like, and you like it, that’s fine.

#G494 VIVITAR TELESCOPE FULL#

Don’t buy it if it’s on sale for $5, don’t buy it for full price. Don’t buy it as a gift for a kid, don’t buy it for yourself just to get started, don’t buy it assuming you can work with its quirks, don’t buy it as a joke for the experienced astronomer in your life.

Do not buy this Vivitar refractor telescope.

G494 vivitar telescope