Sheesh. Once again, I've been given a humiliating demonstration in that most basic lesson of consumption: you get what you pay for. This time it's a telescope: a Celestron PowerSeeker 60 telescope (their catalog number 20141), to be exact; and to be honest, I didn't actually "buy" it, I got it as a reward on one of those points websites. They tell me it normally sells for about fifty dollars... OK, so I didn't pay for it, but maybe you're looking for a beginner telescope for yourself or the kids. Let me give you some advice: buy the most telescope you can afford, and leave the cheap one on the shelf at Wal-Mart (or MyCokeRewards.com, or wherever). But let me tell you about it all, so you can decide for yourself.


Celestron markets their PowerSeeker 60 as a beginner's telescope. The world of telescopes is fraught with choices: refractor or reflector design? altazimuth or equatorial mount? for instance, and as big on jargon as the sky: Newtonian. Schmidt-Cassegrain. Barlow. Focal length. Angular field of view. Resolving power. There's new terminology for everything, and decisions to make at almost every step. It ain't something simple, like buying a car or a computer... And I am by no means an expert, nor is my purpose to educate you on the process of buying a telescope. If you want a very good reference, May I suggest that you visit the starcruiser folks here -

http://www.sipe.com/starcruiser/observatory/html/fg_telescope.html


- instead: they know what they're talking about.


But back to the Celestron PowerSeeker 60: This is a refractor telescope, meaning that it looks like an oversized version of that long, skinny tubey-thing Captain Hook (or Captain Jack) uses to spy on other ships. It has a 60mm optical diameter (the lens at the big end is 60 millimeters or about 2-1/3 inches in diameter) and is thirty-to thirty-five inches long. The mount type is altazimuth, with the telescope sitting atop a pre-assembled aluminum tripod (which even has a cutesy little accessory tray). It comes with two eyepieces (20mm and 4mm, which have magnification of 35X and 175X, respectively). It also has a 3X Barlow lens to effectively triple the eyepiece power. Included is a 5x24 "finderscope" to help aim the tube. The whole works weighs less than seven pounds, including the tripod.

This instrument's pretty easy to assemble, especially since the tripod and altazimuth mount are delivered as a preassembled unit. It took me all of about ten minutes to put it together, and required no tools at all. When done, you're left with a bunch of optical parts (eyepieces, Barlows) in a box, none of which seem to fit into the accessory tray. Celestron also throws in a CD-ROM copy of their software "The Sky Level 1" to teach you about goodies like stellar magnitude, star classes, and other astronomy stuff. They claim it's worth $49.95, but maybe that's when it's sold as a textbook for Astronomy 101 at your local community college.


Of course, setting up your telescope in the dining room in the daytime doesn't mean much: it's getting it out to look at the stars that really counts. So we eagerly awaited the dark (in late June? I should've gotten it in December...) so we could spy on Sirius and bother Betelgeuse. That's when the disappointment kicked in. Even at the lowest power, it's tough to find something with a refractor telescope, since the field of view - the portion of the sky you can see through the 'scope - is quite tiny. And forget about going to a higher power to look at something specific - say, Jupiter and its moons or Saturn's rings - you'll be darned lucky to find anything smaller than the biggest thing in the sky: Earth's own moon.

To be true, the PS 60's optics actually seem fairly good: when you can find the moon, the outlines of its craters are crisp and clear, and you can see the shadows along the terminator even at the lowest power. The process of finding something is, however, very frustrating. The 5x24 "finderscope" mounts right against the barrel of the main scope, which pretty much requires that you squeeze your entire head into a space about two inches wide to use the finder. Ummm, maybe your head...

Even if you found something and get a nice image in your eyepiece, you're in for an unpleasant surprise: things march across the sky as the earth spins on its axis, so a telescope needs constant readjustment to keep it trained on your subject. The PS 60's mounting system is so abysmally designed and manufactured that it's darned near impossible to get it aimed, and once you get it aimed it's almost impossible to keep it aimed. If you swivel the 'scope on its base to point it in the right direction, the finger screw that "locks" the mount in place invariably causes it to rotate several degrees - so the best way to aim it is to lock it in place and rotate the entire tripod! And the slow motion control rod that's supposed to raise and lower the telescope tube? It does almost nothing... The upshot is that once you've found something it'll disappear from your field of view in a few minutes, and you perhaps a fifty-fifty chance of finding it again. That lack of precision in the aiming process means that you'll be darned lucky to find small objects.


My recommendations? Bag this product: it's OK for watching statues on the park next to your condo (though not the birds sitting on them, since they move), or for checking to see if the flag's still up on your mailbox a quarter of a mile away. You might even get a little enjoyment out of peering at the moon - I kind of did. But if you're interested in the heavens - or want to get someone else interested in the heavens - this product is far more effort than it's worth. Be ready to shell out several times (or several severals of times) the cost of this telescope to get something that won't merely frustrate you.

Join an astronomy club and go to "star parties" to learn what good telescopes can do. Do your research. Then buy your first telescope.





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