Bushnell Voyager Sky Tour 76mm Reflector Telescope Reviews

Average Customer Rating - 2.0 out of 5 stars

4 customer reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Good Starter Telescope - Very poor set of instructions, September 27, 2010
I just received this telescope this weekend. The telescope works well, I be able to see Jupiter and three of her moons the first night I set it up. However, the instructions included are virtually useless. The almanac is printed in 5 languages, which scheme it's virtually useless, in 5 languages. There are three eyepieces, three extension tubes of some sort and no description of how respectively is properly used or what function they might serve. The talking sky guide will likely prove to be newly as challenging, I haven't tried it yet.

1.0 out of 5 stars I agree w/ Bones, September 14, 2007
I'm not even qualified to phone call myself an "amatuer" astronomer, but can easilly spot the flaws in the scope. I recieved it as a endowment, and am sad it can't be returned. The biggest pain is that it's not fair and has no elevation fine tuning. When you loosen the knob to change the elevation the telescope speedily 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!

1.0 out of 5 stars It's underwhelming, September 25, 2006
As a proficient amateur astronomer, I be 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 have fine-tuning, there is NO fine tuning on the altitude axis! This is a serious design flaw which makes tracking any celestial purpose 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 fast drops the mirror end and points upwards. It requires support by hand to guide the telescope to the correct altitude.
- the tripod is street lamp weight and has poor (as contained by no) vibration dampening properties. Combined with the akward distribution of weightiness in the telescope, any time you touch the telescope it vibrates violently without settling down quickly (any gust of meander 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 large that the poor dampening of the tripod removes any chance of comfortably viewing any celestial object. The inclusion of the barlow (2x) lenses is a moment ago plain silly, a recommended combination of supporting eye-pieces would have been 25mm, 12.5mm and I don`t know 9mm.
- the azimuth and altitude dials have illumation (which is nice) but the reference points are thorny to see, making them nearly useless. Also there is no dial to adapt the rank of lighting.
- the optics looked OK, but the conditions where poor so I could not determine their true quality.

The one piece I thought was innovative was the spotter influence, 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 simply 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 close to Meade, Celestron, etc... These established brands are more expensive but certainly a lot better within overall workmanship.


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