Celestron Nexstar 60GT 60mm Go-To Refractor Telescope
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| The NexStar handset is your user-friendly guide to more than 4,000 celestial objects. |
Once the Nexstar alignment is completed, the fun of seeing star clusters and planets and galaxies is as easy as pushing a few buttons. The low power 20mm eyepiece (35x) is best for viewing open star clusters and finding objects; I use the 10mm (70X) and 4mm (175X) eyepieces to zoom in on stars and planets. The planets show up quite nicely at 70x, and they're even better with a 6mm plossl eyepiece at 117x. Venus looks like a tiny crescent moon, Jupiter shows off its two major cloud bands, and Saturn's rings are sharply separated from the planet. Bright double stars also show up well. Castor, one of the twin stars in the constellation Gemini, turns out to be a double star only four arc-seconds wide. You'll need that 6mm eyepiece (117x) or the included 4mm (175x) to separate Castor into two beads of light.
Students from middle school on up will find the Nexstar 60GT just the right size. It's affordable, it's light and portable, and it's an easy introduction to the world of computerized telescopes. My first telescope, made of telescoping cardboard tubes, came from an ad in Popular Mechanics magazine. I would have been thrilled to have a telescope as good as the Nexstar 60GT. An adult with a serious interest in astronomy, however, is likely to outgrow a 60mm telescope rather quickly. It takes a larger scope to see the divisions in Saturn's rings or resolve globular clusters into individual stars; if you want that kind of detail, take a look at the telescope buyers guide for some larger ideas. --Jeff Phillips
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