Vivitar Telescope with Tripod: Customer Reviews & Product Details

The telescope is very hard to work for children under 13. I was hoping to be able to set it up for my nephew, but it was hard for several grown people to try to focus the thing. My nephew said that the moon looked bigger if he just stared at it instead of looking inside of this thing. You know what they say, children always say the truth.

I purchased this knowing I wanted a bottom of the line disposable product and I was not dissappointed. It is OK for the price as long as you immediately pitch the tripod into the nearest handy active valcano. You are much better off using your hands and a nearby tree or other support. Everything else works just fine for watching wildlife, but I would not expect it to do well for stargazing.

a pair of binoculars works better than this telescope. It's really hard to find the target and does not bring clearer picture than binoculars.

My 7 old son played with it two hours and has not touched for a few weeks. We'll see it can be used for birds watching.

I purchased one at Walgreen's for $12.75 on close out merely as a demonstration for others of what not to buy. Sure, it is much better than what Galileo made, himself, 400 years ago, but:
1) The product is advertised on the box by the magnification it yields. The manufacturer is betting that you do not know that "quality" is based on light gathering ability (the diameter of the front lens, for a refractor telescope, or the diameter of the rear mirror, in a Newtonian reflector) and NOT by the magnifications printed on the box.
2) The mount is totally flimsy. The constant wobbling prevents clear viewing. A good mount should be able to dampen the vibrations after focusing, for example, in about 2 seconds. This one took about 15 seconds or more. And never stopped even with a light breeze. A solid camera tripod would improve the setup 10-fold.
3) The lowest power eyepiece (12mm/50x) exceeds the performance ability of the telescope for nighttime viewing. A general rule is that the maximum useful magnification = 25 x the diameter (in inches) of the lens (or mirror). The 2" lens x 25 = 50.
4) The eyepieces are poor. Only the very center of them appears to come to focus, with the rest of the image being blurry. And that's with daytime viewing. I can only imaging the collimation flaws in the optics when looking at stars.
5) The eyepieces are inferior, obsolete 0.965" barrel diameter. Today's eyepieces are a universal 1.25" (and 2" diameter for highest quality ones).
6) The box shows color images of the Orion nebula and the Pleiades. Color can only be achieved through time-exposure photography with the telescope on an equatorial mount. With VERY few exceptions (such as a 12" Newtonian reflector), color will NEVER be visible through an eyepiece on any telescope. When color is perceived, it is only when viewing the brightest emission nebula, and then the effect is a slight green color effect.

If you are interested in a telescope, check out your local astronomy club for advice. Avoid any refractor less than 3" or any reflector less than 6 inches.

I bought this for $20 at our local drugstore to use with my son. Once I got home and started to use it, though, I found the image was completely blurry and I couldn't see anything clearly... although I noticed objects directly in front of the lens were sharply in focus. After noticing about half of the reviews all across the Internet for this telescope were positive and half were negative, it occurred to me to check the objective lens (the big one at the end of the tube).

Sure enough, once I unscrewed the piece that housed the lens and flipped it around, the telescope began functioning properly. I secured the housing back in place with some electrical tape. I think this solution should solve the problem for buyers experiencing the blurriness issue.

Cheap materials (and apparently careless production) limit this telescope to young children or very casual astronomers. The eyepieces that come with the set are not terribly powerful (the moon will appear about the size of a dime) and I will try to locate some inexpensive upgrades. Luckily, the telescope has a screw attachment that will connect with a standard camera tripod, because the tripod that comes with the set is flimsy and not terribly useful for fine movements.

In summary, I would recommend this telescope, with the caveat that you may need to do some fiddling to get it working properly and the magnification is not very powerful. However, the cheap price makes all of that palatable.