Lunagrosso " the old Tasco"

[Mr TamiyaCowboy]

hi everyone, this topic goes out to the older astronomers from the mid 60's to 70's.

well i stumbled across a funny looking newton. my sister called me and said " i have a telescope you may want to buy ?"

she then detailed what i thought was either a very cheap made scope or a worth buying scope. a 11TE-5 or otherwise know as the Lunagrosso. to what i gathered tasco did sell some good scopes.

now i have the chance to buy one of these yesteryear telescopes namely the 11te-5 with the old wooden tripod base and a mount head that looks like the EQ2's grandad.

I would like to hear from the older astronomers who may as a younger sprite have used the said scope, what were these old scopes like as an instrument for astronomy.

also what sort of price would i be looking at paying with its original tripod and eyepieces from yesteryear. would it be something worth putting into my scope collection as a talking point, and maybe as a usable scope for star partys ( kelling heath ) to show what astronomy was like in the early space race years.

i know if i do not buy it, it will end up in somewhere like cashconverters or in a local skip. so i really need to know if this oldie is worth saving from the doom that awaits it.

[kenmyers]

I have recently purchased a vintage Tasco, it has fantastic optics and is rock solid.

It is now my main scope (bought purely because it was going cheap) so I am very very very pleased I took the risk.

It uses older .965" eyepieces so check this one.

[Mr TamiyaCowboy]

Sadly i turned down the scope.

after seeing it with my own eyes and hunting around for 3hrs web wise. i have found the scope. its is a medusa 114mm newton scope ( french/france so i gather). was so in hope of it being a vintage tasco but alas.

am going to keep looking for the 11TE-5 as they had good reviews from others about optical quality.

as for the medusa, looks like a 11TE-5 tube and mount wise, but is more a skywatcher clone to me. going to teach my sister how to set it up and use the scope, this way i can check the quality of the optics.

[swamp thing]

Hi

The first scope I purchased was the Lunagrosso 4.5" Tasco newt. This was in the 80,s.

I owned this scope for many years and it showed me many wonders of the night sky. Although I enjoyed using this easy to use scope it was far from faultless.

The first thing that was very evident was the stability of the mount or lack of it. Amazingly this mount in many guises is still being sold today. Luckily the tripod could be stiffened by screwing plywood triangles to the top or the legs. Hanging a weight from the centre of the mount helped to dampen vibrations. With these mods the mount was greatly improved.

The 5x24 finder was awful being a single lens objective. The way they avoided CA was to fit an aperture stop behind the objective stepping it down from 24mm to about 5mm. This being totally inadequatee for finding anything except the moon or the brightest planets. This again could be improved by unscrewing the objective and removing the stop. Although this does mean it will suffer from CA at least you can find fainter stuff with it.

I eventually fitted an 6x30 achromatic finder to mine this was a huge improvement.

I found most of the 0.965" eyepieces that came with it terrible only the 12.5mm and the 20mm were passable. The Barlow lens was best thrown in the nearest bin. Utter rubbish.

0.965" eyepieces of any quality are pretty hard to come by.

I was lucky in that I was given an old 1.25" focuser which I fitted to mine. This greatly improved the choice of available eyepieces.

As you said optically these were nice little scopes. Giving good images. If you could get a decent eyepiece for them it helped a lot.

I gave mine to a friend that lives in Denmark and he's still getting good use out of it. I look forward to using it when I visit him.

Regards Steve