by Arneb » Wed Sep 02, 2020 10:30 pm
Not sure. I think several points are questionable.
Generally, if you want a large aperture ("there is no substitute for aperture, except more aperture"), that makes a telescope more expensive. If you want a relatively large-aperture scope to cost, like, $500, the money has to come from somewhere. In the case of the assembly in your example, it seems to come from the rather shoddy-looking mount and tripod and from the very small, narrow-angle eyepieces. You may be in for an unpleasant surprise there.
I'd go about it differently. The first question is always, what do you want to do with your scope? If you want to have a peek at some Moon craters, a bit of structure on Mars, a cloud band on Jupiter, or Saturn's rings from your balcony or a nearby park, you can easily exchange aperture for sturdiness and better eyepieces - Singapore's skies won't give you many opportunities to really get anything out of the difference between 102 or 114 mm aperture, and 130 mm - too much air movement, too much moisture, too much light pollution. If, on the other hand, you want to travel to dark, transparent and calm skies in order to see faint fuzzies, too, you might consider not to buy cheap equipment at all - after a few trips, you'll have paid enough for the trips to dwarf your initial investment in telescope gear. In other words, why take cheap gear on expensive trips?
If your idea of buying a telescope and making a hobby out of stargazing is more than a fad, I'd turn to a good astronomy shop and ask them what they recommend for your specific needs - even if you don't actually walk into the shop. Good sellers will talk to you via e-mail and clarify what's best for your specific viewing conditions and requirements. And it's no problem to enter into these discussions with a firm upper price limit.
I have some specific points on the offer at hand.
1 Crappy mount and eyepieces can absolutely ruin it for you, see above.
2 Why a German equatorial mount? That type of mount isn't easy to set up correctly, it is not intuitive to operate, and it's usually heavier than a simple alt-az (which as an added bonus doesn't require a counterwight). It has one application (for amateurs) where it's indispensable: Long exposure guided photography - not something you do with a smartphone, and if you want to go into that, the wobbly mount is all the worse. Also, if you really want to go there, you'd be better off with a motorized mount anyway.
3 Even in one of the ad images, the counterweight is almost touching the tripod. If you observe from near the equator, the setup of the equatorial mount will almost certainly cause the counerweitht to make contact with the tripod legs during some observations, because the polar alignment leads to the counterweight bar almost pointing straight down.
4 They talk about a high-transmission *lens* in their scope - but a Newtonian doesn't even have a lens, it's mirrors-only (except in the eyepieces, of course). Lens-mirror hybrids exist, but they aren't called a Newtonian. It's just a matter of nomenclature, but coming from a telescope shop, it sounds fishy.
So no, it's not my recommendation. Seems like a future dust-collecting decorative piece for your appartment. And, as they say, the best telescope is always the one that is used most. So if you want to spend $500 on your first Thing To Look Up At the Sky With, here's a radically different proposal. For $150, get a sturdy photography tripod. For $350, get an excellent 10x50 binocular (or 16x70, if you can do with the heavy stuff), and make sure it has a tripod socket. You can take that anywhere, maybe even in your hand luggage, and use it for the stars and for daylight observations and photography, too. If you're generous, make it 200 for the tripod, and 400 for the scope. If after many a pleasant observation night, you feel you want to see more detail, shell out $ 1,000 and get pro advice on how to spend them.
If it has to be a proper scope RIGHT NOW, a 100 mm (even 80 mm) semi-apochromatic wide-field reflector (lens telescope) on a good alt-az mount with two eyepieces will take you a long way. And for a prospective long-term customer, the competent team of your trusted astronomy shop might even throw in a phone adaptor for small $$.
Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem