Is is me or my equipment

New to sky watching and not sure what the deal is. Did some research and pulled the trigger for an Orion 100mm ED/APO f/9. Eye pieces; 10&25mm orion plossls,13mm orion stratus, 2"x3 apo barlow. I tried every option with these pieces and all I get are little round blips or blips with spikes. Nothing is clean or clear. I got better views from an $80 Galelieo. Any suggestions or reasons why this is? Thanks, Francis :S

Assuming the scope has cooled for awhile to adjust to the ambient temperature, perhaps an optic is pinched causing astigmatism or a problem with the collimation of the scope. If it's really bad, I'm wondering if you've got a flipped element or one that's not rotated in alignment with the other. perhaps a missing spacer in the objective? The objective might be pinched in its cell or perhaps you've been the unfortunate recipient of a bad objective with one or more defects. I assume you've tried it with and without the diagonal and the scope is collimated. Have you tried a star test by racking the eyepiece inside and outside of focus to see if the rings formed by the objective appear concentric and relatively similar in both positions?
If you're not sure what's going on, try Orion's customer service. You may need another unit.

Francis Repoza said:

New to sky watching and not sure what the deal is. Did some research and pulled the trigger for an Orion 100mm ED/APO f/9. Eye pieces; 10&25mm orion plossls,13mm orion stratus, 2"x3 apo barlow. I tried every option with these pieces and all I get are little round blips or blips with spikes. Nothing is clean or clear. I got better views from an $80 Galelieo. Any suggestions or reasons why this is? Thanks, Francis :S

I'm not sure what you expect. A star SHOULD be a "little round blip" and nothing more. As for spikes, those are usually the result of using a low magnification and are an artifact not of the scope, but the eye. What would I do? Find and join your local club and get one of the good folks there to have a look through your scope.

8)