Konusmotor 70mm refractor kit with RA drive and focus motors.

The Konusmotor 70 is an ideal astronomy telescope for all ages making this kit an ideal family telescope. The Konusmotor 70 has a superb 70mm air-spaced achromatic doublet primary lens with an electronic focus controller and comes supplied with a well-engineered German equatorial mounting with fully geared manual slow-motion hand controls on each axis as well as an electric motor drive for the RA axis, and also features a rigid aluminium full height adjustable field tripod and a host of useful accessories.

Supplied with the Konusmotor 70 kit are Two good quality eyepieces - 10mm and 17mm (see below for full specification) giving a useful range of magnifications from high to medium and lower power (wide-angle).

To help find your way among the stars and constellations there's a fantastic electronic red dot LED finder! Red dot finder - it's a clever little gadget that you switch on and it appears to project a red dot on the sky - simply place the red dot on the target you wish to look at! (the red dot finder can even be used during the day to find terrestrial targets - although the telescope is a bit too powerful for useful terrestrial viewing unless the targets are a very long way away (like ships on the horizon for example).

Telescope specifications

Primary lens: Air-spaced achromatic doublet

Focal length: 900mm

Aperture: 70mm (f13)

Electric focuser with handset

Moon filter

CDROM PC astronomy software

Magnification with supplied eyepieces:

52x, and 90x

This is achieved with the following combinations:

10mm = 90x 17mm = 52x (we recommend purchase of a 2x Barlow lens to double these values - see recommendations lower left)

Mounting: German equatorial with dual-axis manual slow motions and electric RA drive motor

Carry case (soft)

So what's so great about the Konusmotor 70 70mm telescope kit?

Well, overlooking the fact that it has everything you need to get going (apart from a clear night that is!) the Konusmotor 70 is a great truly "classic" astronomy telescope. It has a decent-sized aperture, 70mm (2 and 3/4 inch in old money!) to achieve high resolution images, and has a useful long focal length to achieve high magnifications without making the telescope too difficult to use.

At two or three times the price, the Konusmotor 70 is a well-made scope - at our price it's extraordinary value for money. The telescope is well equipped with a motor drive (to subtract the effects of the Earth's daily rotation), a focus motor system (to make visual and photographic focusing easier), and an ultra modern red-dot finder scope (to make pointing and target finding easy).

Complete kit! The equatorial mount is supplied complete with an RA motor to track the stars and an electronic focus system. It has a standard 1.25" eyepiece holder (regarded as the hallmark of a serious telescope) allowing a wide range of additional accessories to be attached. These accessories include camera adaptors (to try your hand at astrophotography), Barlow and amplification lenses (like the ones recommended, lower right, to increase the magnification without using short, difficult to use, eyepieces), as well as wide-angle and higher-powered specialist eyepieces and other accessories to make the telescope easier to use on terrestrial targets.

What can you see with the Konusmotor 70 telescope?

At low to medium power the ancient landscape of the Moon becomes a fabulously intricate panorama of craters, rays and rills. At higher powers individual crater systems can be explored. The planet Mars will show many details on its surface and the polar cap can be seen during ideal observing conditions. At good observing times, when observed at just 60x or higher magnification, the planet Jupiter will appear as a banded disc larger in size than you normally see the full Moon with the unaided eye! The cloud belts of Jupiter will show ever changing detail that will show drift across the planet's face in just a few minutes. The four main moons of Jupiter will be seen orbiting the giant planet, sometimes casting shadows onto Jupiter's dense cloudy atmosphere. The planet Saturn will show its magnificent ring system and its bright famous moon Titan. These are just a few of the things that can be seen in our own solar system with the Konusmotor 70 70mm telescope.