Soligor MT-800

I had the opportunity to use this telescope because my grandad bought it in Portugal. My first impression was its sheer size, being used to my Meade ETX 70 it's 200mm aperture seems enormous.

It has a very hefty equatorial mount which is good, and fine-adjustment controls which can move it quite smoothly when correctly balanced. As I say I am used to a 70mm aperture telescope, so looking through it I was amazed at the brightness and sharpness of objects such as the Orion Nebula, which showed much more detail than I am used to. And a proper equatorial mount meant that piggyback astrophotography was much easier and yielded much better results.

However, on higher magnifications some double images became apparent, and it became extremely difficult to focus properly. Other negatives: its size and weight made it extremely difficult to move around, a two-man job.

I must say though for the price (£400), apart from the issue of portability, its a very good telescope