Review of The Tasco Spacestation 76mm Reflector Telescope (49076700) (price, reviews, purchase)
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The Tasco Spacestation 76mm Reflector Telescope (49076700)
Rating: 1 out of 5
Currently 1.0/5.0
49076700
My oldest daughter watched a movie where a young girl was using a telescope to view the stars and planets and fell in love with the idea. Not surprisingly a telescope was one of the items she put on her Christmas list. Not knowing if her interest would extend beyond Christmas, I bought her the Tasco Spacestation 76mm Reflector Telescope. With a price tag of $189.99 it seemed a reasonable purchase.
The Tasco Spacestation, I found out, is a relatively cheap piece of work. Yes, it comes with a stand and different eye pieces for extra magnification, but it works better looking across terrestrial distances than it does into space. It only has a magnification of 525x. Even with the extra eye pieces, which are 255mm (28x, 10mm (70x) & 4mm (175x) respectively, the magnification isn't that good. The stars show up as brighter blurs and so, in effect, it is useless for space viewing for anything more than magnifying the moon, which can be interesting, but helping her out with it I found myself wishing that there were at least a way to take a picture of the moon surface with the telescope, which of course there isn't.
But it did hold my daughter's attention long enough to have her express an interest in joining an observatory. But once she saw the clarity of the other members' telescope views, she began losing interest in the Tasco Spacestation, and while I can't yet afford a better quality scope, the observatory lets its members rent better quality scopes.
So while the Tasco Spacestation telescope is cheap in that it is not very well constructed and has limited magnification and no tracking or picture taking capabilities, it may be all that is needed to spark a child's interest in the study of space without breaking the parent's bank, and that can make all the difference
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