Overview of TravelScope 50 OTA
The TravelScope 70 is a 70mm achromatic refractor with a focal ratio of f/5.7. Due to this short focal ratio, the scope displays a lot of chromatic aberration (false color) when I look at bright objects with it—in fact, more than it should.
Celestron cheaped out big time on the objective lens and it seems to me that it uses rather low-quality glass and is manufactured to rather poor standards. The scope also struggles to deliver sharp images at 40x—I’ve had good 50mm scopes that do well at twice that magnification! Even the cheapest, wobbliest, most plasticky refractors I’ve ever looked through have had a decent objective lens. The Travelscope 70 fails at even this.
I’ve also noticed that the lens has only a single-layer coating. So between this and the crappy lens, it loses a fair amount of light compared to even moderately more expensive refractors.
The tube is aluminium, but the focuser isn’t—it’s plastic and wobbles.
The scope’s plastic dew shield is so short that it’s practically useless. And since the inside of both the dew shield and the tube are shiny, it was causing glare and reflection problems for me. The tube also seems to have little, if any, internal baffling to stop glare and reflections.
The bottom of the tube has an extremely short Vixen-style dovetail with a ¼ 20 threaded hole, so in theory it can be mounted on a real astronomical mount (which will dwarf it) or any photo tripod.
People seem to like using it as a birding/range scope when mounted on a good photo tripod, but even at its price point, there are far better options for this than the TravelScope 70.
My Views on The Accessories Provided
The scope’s finder is a plastic 5×24. These 5x24s have a singlet(!) objective lens, an aperture stop to control the resulting aberrations that make the image unusably dim, and an eyepiece with a drinking-straw-like field of view. I felt that it is less effective than those toy pirate telescopes made for little kids. Not only is the finder useless, but I also think that it’s completely pointless. The scope’s wide field of view when using low-power eyepieces means that it doesn’t really even need a finder. The telescope basically is its own finder.
The included 45-degree erecting diagonal is not only uncomfortable to use for an astronomical telescope but also extremely low in quality. The entire body and housing are plastic, as is the barrel for inserting it into the focuser drawtube. I’ve seen good diagonals with plastic parts (the prism is what counts, after all), but this one isn’t it.
The Travelscope 70 comes with 20mm and 10mm Kellner eyepieces. The construction of both is largely metal, the field of view decent and the images reasonably sharp, although not as good as a decent Plossl or wide-field eyepiece.
The 20mm Kellner provides a little too much power for the scope for low-power sweeping, while the 10mm, though decent in quality, provides too much magnification for the scope’s mediocre optics.
The Disastrous Mount
Of all the nasty issues I’ve to say about the Travelscope 70, the one that plagues it the most is the mount
The mount lacks slow motion controls, for one. With a longer focal length telescope, I’d probably have more to complain about, but the Travelscope 70 is designed to be a rich-field sweeper used at low power.
The mount for the Travelscope 70 is little more than a dinky, mostly plastic camera tripod sold for small digital cameras and the like.
It suffers from balance problems depending on where the scope is pointed in altitude, but the more serious problem is just how undersized it is. With the legs fully retracted (and thus only suitable for use on a table), it’s not the steadiest. With the legs extended, the tripod has the stability of cooked spaghetti and vibrates noticeably to the untrained eye, with distractingly shaky images at even the lowest magnifications.
