![]() ![]() And the 10mm is rather short on eye relief, requiring you to jam your eye into it to take in the whole field. These eyepieces have metal barrels and glass optics and provide fairly sharp views, though the apparent field of each is only about 50 degrees. The Polaris 130mm EQ comes with two 1.25” Kellner eyepieces: a 20mm providing 33x and a 10mm providing 65x. The rings are bolted directly to the equatorial mount head with no other interface in between, unlike most scopes in this price range, which use a universal Vixen-style dovetail bar and saddle to attach interchangeably to mounts. The Polaris 130MM EQ attaches to its mount via a pair of tube rings, which allow you to rotate the tube and slide it back and forth for balance. There is also a fair amount of shift when you focus the telescope, displacing your target from the center of the field of view and exacerbating the problems of the Polaris 130mm EQ’s less-than-stable mount/tripod. It is unusually tall, owing to its origins as being designed for a refractor, and suffers from a huge amount of backlash and sloppiness, making focusing at higher magnifications difficult. ![]() This is not the focuser typically supplied with cheap reflectors but rather a very low quality one taken from a 60mm or 70mm “department store” refractor with an adapter fitted on. The focuser on the Polaris 130mm EQ is a 1.25” rack-and-pinion unit made entirely out of plastic. A collimation tool is not provided with the Polaris 130mm EQ, but you can easily make one yourself. The secondary mirror can be adjusted with a hex key, which is standard for most telescopes. Unfortunately, you need a screwdriver to collimate the Polaris 130mm EQ, and the screws for collimating the primary mirror are hidden behind a cover that you have to pry off the back of the telescope. ![]() An f/5 telescope performs acceptably with most 1.25” eyepieces, though the edge of the field of view can have some aberrations like astigmatism, particularly with cheap oculars like the ones supplied.Īt f/5, collimation (alignment of the primary and secondary mirror optics) is fairly critical for good performance. The Sky-Watcher Heritage 130P, Zhumell Z130, and Gskyer 130mm EQ all feature proven parabolic optics with the same specs as the Polaris 130mm EQ, and are vastly superior telescopes as a whole. The optics in these telescopes at least seem to be parabolic, though there is the concern of shoddy spherical mirrors (which cannot provide a sharp image at high magnification) being swapped in, as is, unfortunately, the case with the Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ. The Solomark Polaris 130mm EQ is a 130mm (5.1”) f/5 Newtonian reflector with a focal length of 650mm. Don’t worry, we’ve adequately examined and tested this telescope for you. If you must have a 130mm equatorial reflector, we’d recommend the Gskyer 130mm EQ or Orion SpaceProbe 130ST instead – or even better, a tabletop Dobsonian like the Sky-Watcher Heritage 130P or the larger Heritage 150P.Īs with many less-than-good beginner telescopes, reviews on Amazon of the Solomark Polaris 130mm EQ are biased, as many people are just happy to get a semi-acceptable view of the Moon or Jupiter at low magnifications with this telescope and give it a 5-star rating – and there are of course fake reviews and shills, too. The Polaris 130mm EQ is also easily more expensive than a good 114mm or 130mm tabletop Dobsonian telescope which will provide much better images. The optics may be acceptable and the telescope certainly works okay, but its overall design and included accessories are less than acceptable, let alone at the price it commands, which rivals that of a 6” Dobsonian. The Solomark Polaris 130mm EQ at first glance doesn’t seem that bad, but it’s in many ways flawed in the same manner as the Celestron AstroMaster 130EQ.
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