A budding amateur astronomer? Want a serious power telescope you can take virtually anywhere? Or are you looking for an easy-to-use, high-quality but affordable telescope for your child? Look no further, you have found it!
The SkyWatcher Virtuoso GTi 130/650 Flex Dobson telescope is an extremely easy to carry, ultra-compact, featherweight astronomical telescope that is priced far from astronomical. The tube is collapsible, allowing you to shrink the already small size even further. It's a real take-and-hold telescope, and its optical performance will impress the novice astronomer.
The soul of the SkyWatcher Virtuoso GTi 130/650 Flex Dobson scope is the 130mm precision-machined main mirror, which unlike many entry-level mirror binoculars has a paraboloid surface rather than a sphere, so you get a nice, sharp image even at high magnifications. With such a large instrument, there is a lot to see in the night sky. The countless craters of the Moon, the ring of Saturn or the colourful clouds of Jupiter will certainly impress the observer, as will the dozens of star clusters, nebulae and galaxies that this telescope already shows up beautifully in the dark skies of the countryside.
The tube is only 44 cm long when folded. The telescope comes with a 25 mm and a 10 mm barium eyepiece, which give magnifications of 26x and 65x respectively. Of course, by purchasing additional eyepieces or a Barlow lens, the magnification range can be extended up to 200x.
The telescope's tube is driven by SkyWatcher's latest development of a desktop half-arm Dobsonian GoTo mechanism called the Virtuoso Gti MiniDobson.
The mechanic can communicate with your smartphone via built-in WiFi by downloading the SynScan App from Google Play or App Store, with the option to use a Synscan handheld controller. With the app or handheld controller, you can access data from 42,900 objects, allowing you to find plenty of spectacular objects in dark rural skies that your telescope diameter will allow.
Although the Virtuoso Gti Minidobson should be placed on a table for comfortable use, it is possible to mount it on a tripod with a 3/8-inch photo tripod thread, so you can freely raise the complete mechanics to a comfortable height. One such stand is the StarAdventurer tripod stand.
The unit can be powered by 8pcs AA pencil batteries in a built-in battery compartment, or optionally from a 12V mains power supply or gel battery. Not only can you move your binoculars around, you can also mount a digital camera instead of binoculars to take astro-landscapes or time lapse videos, and the mechanism also offers a jack connection for timed exposure.
