Sky WatcherSky-Watcher Virtuoso GTI 150P Collapsible Tabletop GoTo Dobsonian Telescope

A fantastic portable telescope. Lots of reviews out there and alot of people say its an all rounder that's hard to ignore for its price.Needs a tutorial for collimation if you're new to it all like I was, luckily I bought a Lazer from svbony and it was very each to collimate, ie focus mirrors Into allignment.Great for visual, capable of astrophotography.Two truss open design requires lighter equipment but people manage fine it seems.I took a picture of the full moon using svbony "bronze line" set. The 4mm 10mm and 23mm, just by holding my s20+ up to the eyepiece. I dont remember which eyepiece i used. One basic picture but the second I pinch zoomed in gallery and it's really good quality. I'm impressed with the scope and eyepieces.I have a three legged 15 inch wide table i got from homegoods, for a base. Nice and stable, haven't used with goto yet though. Should be stable but I'll have to buy a power pack as 8 AA batteries isn't possible with a 12v requirement. I'm not interested in paying 2x to 4x the price of a scope for a mount even if it has fancy features or is technically superior.So as such Ill carry it on the small table and walk out the door and it's stable when I set it down, even when the scope is fully extended.Goto or freedom find. Manual or automatic. Nice features.First quirk is needing to build a light shroud, haven't done it yet but there are some videos out there.And the second is the focuser. Its helical and has alot of complaints. Another D I Y is teflon tape or plumbers tape to fix the poor fit of the focuser and its housing for optimal use but ultimately isn't necessary. Another thing that helps with stray light and what not a shield around the focuser is known to help.Over all 4.5 star. Will get dusty though. Have to think about that, and storage. Nice and portable.

Overall it’s awesome.Great image and very portable.Problem is tracking at high magnification is rough. There’s a ton of backlash (can be tightened internally). I can only stay on target for 8-10 minutes.There’s also a ton of features in the software that are disabled for no reason. Some would be incredibly beneficial like tracking speed. If they turned all the features on it would be excellent all around.

This is not quite a total begginers telescope, but simple enough. It 's quite capable of planetary and deep space observation. The go-to works fine if you follow the alignment procedure, which is not complicated at all. The only thing I disliked were the eyepieces that came with it. They are acceptable, but do not do justice to the possibilities that this telescope offers. I bought 3 wide angled eyepieces (6mm, 9mm and 15mm) to complement the 10mm and 25mm that came with the scope. I know there is not a big difference between 10 and 9 mm in terms of magnification but the quality of the new ones make a whole lot of difference. Great scope in general, very portable and great for us mere mortals who just want a glimpse of the universe. 9/10.

At the end of the day this telescope did not do what I expected it would do based on the manufacturer's claims on the Amazon page and elsewhere. Specifically, the GoTo feature is absolutely useless, because the error in the pointing is several degrees, and while several degrees might not seem like a lot, it is a very large error when evaluated relative to the field of view that find yourself using with this telescope. With a 6" telescope with a 750mm focal length, the magnification available, per standard rule of thumb, is 300x. I only tried 150x, and with this milder magnification factor combined with an eyepiece that has a typical 50-degree "apparent" field of view, the actual field of view is 1/3 degree, or 20 minutes of arc. The precision and accuracy needed, in order for the GoTo function to work, is about half as great as this number, which was obtained using a conservative magnification factor. The bottom line is that in order for the GoTo function to work, the error in the pointing needs to be no greater than 10 minutes of arc, or 1/6 of a degree. The actual error is easily more than 10x greater than this.I tried all of the different alignment methods, and was extremely careful in the manual corrections. In spite of my best and repeated efforts, the pointing error, when using GoTo after the alignment, was never less than 2 degrees, and that's giving it the benefit of the doubt. In reality I doubt if it was ever much less than 5 degrees.The manual alignment was never a factor. The same application is used with SkyWatcher telescopes with equatorial mounts. These mounts use a different type of motor, called a stepper motor, which allows the software that is in control to be really and truly in control. The several different kinds of manual alignment are supported by the application for when it is used with their equatorial mounts. The instructions make no mention of the fact that you are wasting your time if you do anything more than single-star alignment with this telescope.I can't say with certainty why the error in the pointing is as bad as it is, however I have a hunch. It is related to the use of clutches on both the altitude articulation of the mount and the azimuth articulation of the mount. The use of the clutches is not compatible with the use of stepper motors. It is all but certain that in this telescope, an ordinary (and cheap) DC motor is used together with a sensor by which the application on the smartphone is able to keep track of the number of degrees of movement. It is manifest that the clutch facilitates slippage between the motor and the part that the motor is attempting to drive (in the case of the azimuth articulation this would be the base of the mount, assuming that the motor is mounted in the lower half of the upright section). The decision to use an ordinary DC motor meant that it would be necessary to use a motion sensor, and also meant that it would be possible to use a manual clutch, thus making it possible for users to point the telescope manually, and to do so without ruining the alignment.Unfortunately, it does not work, and the only discernible reason is that the precision in the motion sensor is nowhere near as fine as it would need to be in order for this to work. In order for this to work, they could have used secondary gearing, on each of the two articulations, on the driven side, such that the motion of the moving part of the motion sensor would be perhaps 50x greater than the motion of the driven side. This would have permitted detection of motion at a much finer scale.If this had been done, the GoTo function would most likely work. But it does not work, because there is a reasonable limit on how great the pointing error can be, and the actual pointing error is significantly more than 10x greater that this reasonable limit.The tracking function, on the other hand, works well for certain kinds of celestial objects. Moreoever, the application does have the ability to move the telescope in fine increments when you tap on the control pad buttons that resemble a joystick. In fact, the use of these buttons in the application is probably the single greatest feature of the telescope. I encountered no problems with that, once I realized that it is necessary to set the speed appropriately, and once I figured out how to configure my iPhone settings so that the WiFi connection to the hot spot in the mount would not drop.The tracking function also works very well so long as the celestial object you are viewing is suitable to one of the kinds of tracking that the software in the application is programmed to do. Lunar tracking worked very well so far as I could tell. Sidereal tracking is useful for celestial objects beyond the solar system, and it also works reasonably well for the distant planets starting with Jupiter. It does not work at all well for Venus (and would not have worked for Mercury, which I did not try). For Venus, the motion of the planet itself would need to be taken into account, and this is not done. I did not try Mars, but the same would be true for Mars.Whether the Virtuoso 150P is or isn't a good telescope to buy depends on your purposes. If you absolute need the GoTo functionality and need for it to be precise, this is not a good telescope for you to buy. If you don't need that functionality, and if you don't mind that it won't track Venus or Mars, then it might be a good telescope, depending on whether the other features that work are important to you. The choice of telescope is very personal. There are more than a few bad telescopes, but they are mostly cheap telescopes with inferior refractive optics, and this telescope is certainly not anything like that. If the features that it has and that work are suitable to your needs, this is a great telescope and a decent value. It all depends on your needs.

Found it to be clear, highly portable, well functioning for the price point, and despite the much maligned plastic screw in focusing, very good all around. I think if you can’t fit an 8” DOB, this is the way to go. Needs a solid base, but I built one of my own but you can find plenty of easy and available walk around a for that from ikea or your garage. Very happy.