| When I was young, my parents bought me a telescope for christmas one year. It was one of those little Tasco 40mm refractors you often see in supermarkets or the Argos catalogue, and to be honest I spent more time looking across the valley behind our house with the terrestrial eyepiece! More recently I was reading an issue of 'Focus' magazine when on holiday and a spacey-themed article (combined with adverts in the back for nice telescopes!) sparked my interest again, and I decided to get back into star gazing. After doing some research, I ended up going for a TAL 2M Reflecting Telescope. It has a 6" mirror, and comes with an equatorial mount motorized in one axis.The TAL doesn't have the same modern polished look and go-to facility of the Meade and Celestron offerings, but the general consensus was that the image quality was excellent for the cost. |
Once I unpacked all the bits, I assembed it in the garden and used some distant trees to align the finder scope. I got some good use out of the telescope for a couple of years, and you can see some of the results on the astrophotography page. Eventually, I moved house though, and ended up in the centre of a city, so the telescope stayed unused for most of the time. I did drag it out to look at brighter objects such as Saturn, Jupiter and the Moon but I didn't use it as much as I'd like. More recently, I've moved again to a much smaller town and I have a lovely dark back garden, so hopefully it'll get more use soon! |
The image on the left shows the assembled telescope - click the image to visit the official Tal website. The 'scope arrived in two large boxes, one suspiciously coffin-looking! The coffin-box contained the main optical tube, the tube for the stand, the feet and some other bits and bobs. The second box, although smaller, seemed to weigh more and contained the drive mount, the counterbalance weight and some of the accessory parts. The two pictures below show the box contents on arrival.
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