Free telescope

[Zaffice]

Hi, Early today I received a telescope from a neighbor. They said everything is blurry through it so they were about to throw it away. Its a 70/300 Alt Az, it is almost identical to this: http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Datyson-70-300-Monocular-Space-Astronomical-Telescope-HD/1602026923.html

It has a H20mm eyepiece, a H4mm, and a 3x Barlow.  I'm not expecting to see much of anything with it, and will be testing it in a few hours. But should I expect anything at all?

[ronin]

Probably throw the barlow and the 4mm.

The 20mm should give an idea of how it will perform, if it is 1.25" eyepieces you can get inexpensive plossls that will be better. Getting 0.965" eyepieces is more difficult. Have seen some and they were plossl's in 0.965" so may be track them down.

Alternative is a 0.965 to 1.25 diagonal converter.

Should be OK on the moon and there are a number of double stars to aim it at.

Could try M57 Ring Nebula if you get a better eyepiece.

Orion in a couple of months should also be fair.

Cannot think of any obvious galaxies or nebula.

Several clusters are worth tracking down.

Trick is to deterine what it is most useful for.

[mdstuart]

Try it on albeiro the coloured double star at the base of Cygnus the swan....

[Chris]

You should be able to see the moon and planet's albeit at a small scale, it's a short focal length achromatic refractor which will show a fair amount of purple fringing called chromatic aberration on bright objects, this does make the image slightly less sharp than more expensive apochromatic refractors but hey it was free!:-)

The H on the eyepieces stands for Huygens which is a really old design of eyepiece which are often bundled with cheap scopes, they aren't very good and will further reduce the quality of the views but if you stick to the very low power h20 then you should have some luck with it:-)

Chris

[astronymonkey]

I'd say moon and planets, pliedes, double cluster, m13 globular cluster, andromeda galaxy, orion neb.

Not bad for free.

Cheers

[Zaffice]

I forgot to mention that it is 0.965", If I get my hands on a diagonal converter any time soon I'll have to try it with my current 1.25" eyepieces.

Thank you all for the help.