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An old Refractor telescope......


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I've recently acquired an old refractor telescope...it is in not to good of shape and was thinking about putting this on a eq. mount. Is this possible? This old mount I think is missing some original pieces like screws for the tube mount and on the finder scope the lens is loose and other small details.....I thought this scope would be good for viewing closer objects like the moon and the sun.....Anyone ever seen this scope before? Never seen one like this before and I think it is at least 20 + years old. Would greatly appreciate any info on this scope

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Well the finder scope is fine it seems but when I switch over I can't get the immage in focus......have not had a go at the stars yet.....just brought this home today and I am in the process of cleaning it.....was standing in the attic the last15 years. and the person who it belonged to left it behind when he moved out. who knows how long he had it before that

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That's an intriguing finderscope. I assume you twist the knob and it drops a mirror or prism into the optical path of the main objective lens?

As to why you can't achieve focus through the main focusser, I suspect that the draw tube isn't long enough to be used without either a diagonal or a terrestrial erect image lens. From the pictures it appears you do have the latter, have you tried it?

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That's an intriguing finderscope. I assume you twist the knob and it drops a mirror or prism into the optical path of the main objective lens?

I had a similar set-up on my old Tal. You used the finderscope to find an object then pulled a mirror out of the way to view through the main scope. It was a very peculiar set-up and an absolute pig to find anything with...

DD

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That's an intriguing finderscope. I assume you twist the knob and it drops a mirror or prism into the optical path of the main objective lens?

As to why you can't achieve focus through the main focusser, I suspect that the draw tube isn't long enough to be used without either a diagonal or a terrestrial erect image lens. From the pictures it appears you do have the latter, have you tried it?

just now google terrestrial erect image lens :icon_rolleyes: thought it was a barlow lens....no have not used it yet. Just got scope couple of days ago...would still like to know a little more about this scope, like how old what kind ex,.....and about twist knob yes exactly how you explained....
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  • 3 weeks later...

It looks very similar to a Tasco model that was around in the early 1970's. I guess it's older than many members of this forum so experience with them will be limited.

For astro use don't use the erecting lens as it degrades the image a lot. Check to see if the drawtubes have been fully extended - my old 1960's Tasco has an inner drawtube within the focuser tube that needs to be extended before the scope will reach focus.

Use the lowest power eyepiece to try and get it to focus on something a long way off, preferably astronomical. As said before, its best to throw the sun filter away to avoid any temptation to use it. They are horrible things.

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It looks like it came out the the same factory as my old "Prinz" refractor. I think it was Dixons branding stuck on a Tasco scope. It was in the mid 70's.

Mine didn't have the funky finder though. So the similarity ends there.

As it was my first proper scope I was blown away by it. I discovered the universe with it!

It came with a Barlow lense and a 1.5x "erecting lense" for terrestrial use. They were both useless really. The image quality through them was poor. The eye pieces 6, 9 and 20 were functional but the 6mm was only usable on the moon and maybe the brighter planets.

Mine had a wooden tripod, I think the steel ones came out later.

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As others have said, you MUST get rid of the sun filter, eye piece filters are dangerous and will damage your sight.

If you want to observe the sun get some Baader Solar film and make a filter for the objective lens at the front.

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That's an intriguing finderscope. I assume you twist the knob and it drops a mirror or prism into the optical path of the main objective lens?

I thought it was quite intriguing, too. And what a complicated way to go about things. You'd have thought it would be far easier to make a finderscope than the flip-mirror arrangement. How does it deal with the different optical lengths, I wonder?

Given that the objective is supposed to be 60mm I'd expect the rings would need to be a bit bigger than that, but it's easy enough to work out the diameter by measuring the circumference of the OTA. It doesn't matter if the rings you get are two or three millimetres too big as you can pad them out with cork or felt liners.

James

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