Review on BARSKA Starwatcher 400x70mm Refractor Telescope with Tabletop Tripod and Carry Case for Ideal SEO by Chris Beals

I bought this scope because it was under $60 and I needed something to tweak and experiment with rendering. I was positively surprised! On the bad side, the diagonal wasn't very good. There is a double image. I didn't care because I wasn't going to use it anyway. The seeker wasn't up to it either. It worked but was a bit difficult to adjust. Again, I had no intention of using it, so I didn't care. Now for the good: The 70mm lens is surprisingly good for a "beginner" scope. It's actually a decent piece of glass. The rack and pinion focuser is fine. With a small voltage adjustment, everything worked better than I expected. The tripod turned out better than I expected. I don't use it, but it's a functional tabletop tripod and I'll find a use for it. The eyepieces have also turned out better than expected and will be added to my collection. The carry case is great and I use it to store accessories for my other scopes. Now for the best: the lens, optical tube and focuser are excellent for the price. The focus tube is long enough to be used with any CCD or CMOS camera. I mounted mine on a moving head mount, swapped out the viewfinder and used it with a Celestron NexImage 5 camera to take pictures of the moon. The 400mm focal length combined with the 7mm CMOS chip provides an ideal field of view for moon photography. Put a decent 45 degree corrective diagonal on it and it's a great spotter for birds etc. I use it on an ultra light wide angle thermal camera. I used it last night to take some pictures of the November full moon and it worked great! If you're a handyman like me, for $60 you can't go wrong. If you're willing to shell out a few bucks more for a decent diagonal, this could be a great spotting scope for less than $100!