10" Pemium Discovery Dobsonian Telescope

I have owned hundreds of telescopes over my 55 years of amateur astronomy bliss, Questars, Unitrons, Tahahashis, Zeiss, TeleVue, Starsplitters, cave and Edmunds. I must say that viewing last night with my 10" F/6 PDHQ surpassed them all!

The telescope tube is beautifully made from sono tube and the very strong base is constructed of lovely birchwood. The bearings are extremely large and make for slewing with scope a labor of love. Very smooth and stops and holds where ever you want it to. Nudging it at high power was very easy as well.

My scope has the 2" Feather touch focuser with fine focusing, wow buttery smooth and honing in on the perfect focus is a breeze. At two hundred eighty five power finding the sweet spot was "simple."

I observed Jupiter first at 101X with my TeleVue 15MM Radian eyepiece. It was gorgeous!! I saw about six belts very clearly and five moons, four of which were clear discs. Color on the planet was clearly visable. I then thought I would try my 2.8 Klee 2.8X Barlow even though I thought it might break the image down, no way, not a bit! There I was staring at beautiful Jupiter at 285X, sharp belts and festoons and the moons as larger discs! This is a high quality mirror set.

As I was getting quite cold, I figured I would try for the Andromeda Galaxy, I put in my 35MM TeleVue Panoptic and glided the scope over, the She was in all her glory. Now I should have started with describing my horrible observing sight at home between Niagara Falls and Buffalo, NY. Need I say more? I have two street lights in front of my home. All things considered, Andromeda was beautiful, nice bright core fading out at the edges. No, I cannot say I saw the spiraling arms, but I do believe that given a better observing site, I will be able to detect some structure, the brightness was there.

Do I like this scope? Absolutely. I think it is well worth the new price of $1349 plus $150 shipping. The Feathertouch focuser is an additional $250 and the telrad is standard. So, for about $1750 new you have a scope that is capable of doing it all visually, that is soundly constructed and that looks beautiful besides. The scope does come with two capable eyepieces but I like my TeleVues.