lol

[Siguy]

Just found this image.
http://www.rocketroberts.com/astro/images/junkscop.jpg

[schlaugh]

Wow...I mean...just....wow...

Please tell me this is some really really old ad?

ETA: Durn, 1999!

This is like a picture game - find the things that don't fit. Except in this case find the things that are just wrong.

[RickJ]

That ad has been around for quite a few years. I saw it in a local paper about 4 or 5 years ago. Only difference I see is that this ad says in one place you can see 100 billion miles, about 24 trillion miles short of the nearest star except for the sun and in another says it can see thousands of light years. The ad I saw stopped at 100 billion miles. Lightyears weren't mentioned. The company name is different as well but I bet it is still the same outfit. They just change names to stay ahead of the BBB complaints.

I always wondered where those "reflective lenses" were in that scope. I'd not seen a refractor that used magnon mirrors before.

I've used a scope since the late 40's but never recall seeing asteroids collide in a fiery collision before. How'd I miss that? I must have had inferior telescopes all these years.

Where we see obvious outright false claims the average buyer has so little astronomical knowledge they don't see the laughers and tend to see a great price, forget the adage that if it is too good to be true it probably isn't true and buy it.

Unfortunately it isn't a laughing matter.

I was a supervisor for a Hyde Memorial Observatory for 27 years. We saw this exact scope as well as others just as bad brought in by kids that had saved their allowances for months to buy a telescope and wanted us to make it work.

It was really sad.

At least they didn't claim 600 power as one of these (30 mm single plastic objective lens stopped down to 5mm!) did. Yeah, 600x from a 5 mm plastic lens. The scope in this ad also used a single plastic lens, not stopped down so it was great for viewing virtual rainbows. I can't recall its aperture as if that mattered.

I tried to get our attorney general to shut the outfit down that was selling the 600x 5mm scope as it was a local store selling them but he said people wasting $30 wasn't worth the effort. Too bad he didn't see the kid who paid that, crying when I had to tell him it couldn't be fixed. I hope he grew up to be a smart consumer. Then maybe it was worth the money after all.

We didn't begin to have the budget (we are supported only by donations) to do anything more than guide the parent to allow Santa to fix the problem come Christmas. Fortunately, many did. Our astronomy club that staffs the observatory holds a class for new telescope owners shortly after Christmas and we often saw the same kid back, this time with an appropriate telescope and grinning from ear to ear. Too bad that wasn't the first time I saw them.

Rick

[Dave Mitsky]

The telescope evaluator Ed Ting (http://www.scopereviews.com/) gave a talk at the Black Forest Star Party a few years ago and used that very ad as part of it.

Dave Mitsky

[torque of the town]

We have similar Ad's in the UK claiming 4000% magnification :confused:
I even remember one saying "see the canals on mars"....Must have been endorsed by Percy :lol:

[Kyle Edwards]

"for a clear, close up view range of 100 billion miles"

"They are designed to penetrate some of the remotest sights in the universe, thousands of light years away."

Ok, that makes perfect sense...

[Maksutov]

I liked the part about "Now bring the surface of the Moon, Mars, Venus, etc., right into your living room." Yup, that's where we have our telescopes set up for some serious planetary observing. Plus I guess you need a really good mount to "Track comets streaking across the heavens." Those darn things ought to get speeding tickets as they whoosh across the sky.

BTW, what does "objective high-impact lenses" mean? Plastic lenses that aren't subjective ?

Back in the 1950s there were always ads in the back of Popular Mechanics (http://media.popularmechanics.com/images/covers/195005.jpg), etc., for cheap plastic knock-off binoculars that boldly claimed "SEE 50 MILES!" A friend was going to buy a pair. I asked him if he had even seen the Moon. His slightly-irritated reply was "Of course I have." "Did you have to use binoculars?" I asked. "No!" "Well. when you looked at the Moon, you saw about 240,000 miles without the aid of a plastic toy."

It's sad to see variations on those ads are still around. They probably sell one of those telescopes every minute.

[Maksutov]

Heck, the binocular ads are still around (http://www.usasd.com/)!

[Kaptain K]

Note that nowhere in the ad does it give the magnification! They almost missed the objective diameter (3.5cm), but whoever heard of using centimeters for diameter?

[Glom]

What strikes me is that it can't decide whether it's selling a refractor or a reflector.

[Noclevername]

Note that nowhere in the ad does it give the magnification!

Isn't it the "20X, 30X, 40X" line?

[Kaptain K]

Isn't it the "20X, 30X, 40X" line?
I was talking about the binoculars in Maksutov's post (post #8), not the scope in the OP.

[Glom]

Isn't it the "20X, 30X, 40X" line?

Which is actually pretty crap anyway.

[Philippe]

"...and distant galaxies, such as the Milky Way..."

????????????????

I don't know if I should laugh or cry.

I was thinking, "bah, $30, no biggie." Then I read Rick's post. And hopeful kids are probably their true targets. These people are truly despicable.

I guess I shall cry...

[NGCHunter]

The worst part of it all are these sensational phrases like "asteroids collide in fiery explosions!" Incidently, I swear I've seen that exact phrase printed on the side of a plastic telescope for sale at walmart years ago. It made me furious to read that. Even if the intended victim doesn't buy the scope, they get it in their little heads that this is what you can expect to see even in small telescopes, so even if their parents buy them a reasonably good telescope for christmas their expectations of what they can see with it are way out of line with reality. Even if they're really lucky and their parents take them to a public viewing with really big amateur telescopes, they're still not going to see any of these sensationalistic things. I wonder how many people have been turned off to astronomy because of the let down caused by these products.

[Startrekker]

I was one of the kids that fell victim to a scam like this. It turned me off to astronomy for years. I must have been 12 or so when i got my 500x wal mart telescope. It worked so poorly that I never bothered again...until now

Now as a college freshman considering a major in physics-astronomy, i decided to buy a new telescope, a real one. My Orion skyquest xt6 dobsonian should come soon. I am excited.

[torque of the town]

"...and distant galaxies, such as the Milky Way..."



You have to buy the super deluxe model for this type of deep sky work.

[Veeger]

I agree, these kinds of ads are deceptive and misleading and I can understand how a kid could get "turned off" astronomy. My first scope was a cheap 3" reflector, spherical mirror (thankfully, it was glass), cheap masked eye-pieces and a tripod mount so flimsy and cheap it froze solid and wouldn't turn one particulary cold winter night. (Did I mention it was cheap?) But the great thing, the scope was given to me as a gift in a generic brown case without any advertising hype and I had no preconceptions about its capability. That scope became the catalyst for a lifetime interest for me. I squeezed every ounce of capability of it, even building my own fork-type, equatorial mount out of plywood. I still keep the log books where I recorded my observations including the elusive comet Kohoutek, Orion trapezium and rings of Saturn (fuzzy but seeable).

A cheap scope need not be a deterent to young astronomers but unrealistic expectations created by these kinds of ads will usually lead to disappointment.

-Veeger

[NEOWatcher]

"...and distant galaxies, such as the Milky Way..."
Well, let me play advertising attorney for a moment... Devil's advocate? or just plain devel?

Can be interpreted as distant galaxies that are similar to the Milky Way galaxy.

"Be absolutely spellbound in your ringside seat as asteroids collide in fiery explosions"
They never said you'd see them. Only that they occur at the same time.

Now, back to reality

"Both exit pupil lenses and objective high-impact lenses engineered for maximum transmission."

What?
I can only make out... it has a lens to see through.

[Philippe]

NEO, if you stretch reality/truth/common sense anymore, it'll snap back like a broken elastic and whip you fingers!!
:-D

[TrAI]

Note that nowhere in the ad does it give the magnification! They almost missed the objective diameter (3.5cm), but whoever heard of using centimeters for diameter?

Hmmm... Is there really any reason for not using centimeters for measuring the diameter?

Sure, it seems more common to use millimeters for lens diameters, but there really is no ambiguity or loss of accuracy in using cm...

[Kaptain K]

Hmmm... Is there really any reason for not using centimeters for measuring the diameter?

Sure, it seems more common to use millimeters for lens diameters, but there really is no ambiguity or loss of accuracy in using cm...
True, but the convention is mm.
As far as I have noticed, centimeters comes in a distant 4th after millimeters, meters, and even inches.
When I was growing up (OK, I'm in the USA) the Hale scope at Palomar was always the 200 inch scope. It's only lately that is has been more often referred to as a 5 meter scope.

[Siguy]

I believe that meters are only used for really large telescopes. Millimeters are most common. Inches are typically used to compliment millimeters.

Centimeters you usually only see as describing radio telescopes, but they are often used for optical ones when the subject at hand is not the telescope itself.

[Kaptain K]

I've seen amateur scopes described with fractional meters - .5 meter RC or .4 meter SC.