Product Details

Bushnell Voyager Sky Tour Reviews

I agree w/ Bones
by VtwinDude from Margaritaville, St. Somewhere, 2007-09-14

I'm not even qualified to call myself an "amatuer" astronomer, but can easilly spot the flaws in the scope. I recieved it as a gift, and am sad it can't be returned. The biggest pain is that it's not balanced and has no elevation fine tuning. When you loosen the knob to change the elevation the telescope rapidly falls and points straight up! Pretty tough to find anything when you're constantly having to hold the telescope from falling and looking through the cheap plastic viewfinder at the same time! Do yourself a favor and look elsewhere!

It's underwhelming
by J. L. Bonebakker from Mountain View, California USA, 2006-09-25

As a proficient amateur astronomer, I was given an opportunity to play with this telescope at a friends house. My conclusion: it's not worth the money.

Here's why:
- only the azimuth axis has fine-tuning, there is NO fine tuning on the altitude axis! This is a serious design flaw which makes tracking any celestial object difficult to impossible. (the telescope has an alt-azi mount, not an equitorial mount).
- the telescope is unbalanced, i.e. when the altitude brake is released the telescope immediately drops the mirror end and points upwards. It requires support by hand to guide the telescope to the correct altitude.
- the tripod is light weight and has poor (as in no) vibration dampening properties. Combined with the akward distribution of weight in the telescope, any time you touch the telescope it vibrates wildly without settling down quickly (any gust of wind was easily detectible).
- the supporting eye-pieces are poor, they include 12.5, 9 and 4mm, but at these combinations, the resulting magnification is so high that the poor dampening of the tripod removes any chance of comfortably viewing any celestial object. The inclusion of the barlow (2x) lenses is just plain silly, a recommended combination of supporting eye-pieces would have been 25mm, 12.5mm and maybe 9mm.
- the azimuth and altitude dials have illumation (which is nice) but the reference points are hard to see, making them nearly useless. Also there is no dial to adapt the level of lighting.
- the optics looked OK, but the conditions where poor so I could not determine their true quality.

The one thing I thought was innovative was the spotter scope, it uses an interesting approach to finding celestial objects using a red dot projected onto a lens. Unfortunately the spotter scope darkens the surrounding sky making it only applicable to the brightest of stars and planets.

My overall conclusion is that this telescope is not well thought out. It will provide a challenging and annoying experience when used to look at celestial objects. I would recommend against purchasing this product and look at better brands like Meade, Celestron, etc... These established brands are more expensive but certainly a lot better in overall workmanship.