Tasco 8X Telescope

It's awfully tempting to buy something that calls itself a telescope but sells for so little... but resist the temptation. This is a piece of junk that will probably discourage a youngster from an interest in astronomy than it will to interest him. The mount is spindly and unusable- certainly it's almost impossible to focus while sitting on the mount. The actual objective lens is masked off to less than an inch. At night it's worthless; the image obtained is so dim and fuzzy as to be worse than simple naked eye viewing.

It's possible to buy a good, usable telescope for as little as $100, and there are many sources of information on how to select such a scope. There's epinions, of course, magazines like Sky & Telescope and Astronomy, books like Phil Harrington's "Star Ware" and web sites like http://www.findascope.com. What any of them will tell you is one, there's no such thing as a usable telescope for much under $100, and two, even at that price there's a lot of what we call "Christmas junk" telescopes out there.

A good telescope- even at under $100- is a gateway to a lifelong hobby. But something like this isn't even a decent toy.