Hello Friend,

Come the month of January   many people come  into the store with
telescopes they received over the holidays, that were usually purchased at a department or
big box store as a well intentioned gift  wondering why their scopes do not seem
to work properly.

     In many cases they are poorly made junk, brought in for the holiday season to sell
to unsuspecting buyers.

       Usually the packaging is very fancy, with lots of colourful pictures of Planets and deep space objects
but the product itself has very little substance.

The manufacturers are usually obscure as well.

Now in some cases we can help by replacing a part, say a plastic eyepiece with plastic optics,
with an eyepiece that has better quality optics.

    In some cases it simply is not worth the money or the effort.

We advise them to take it back if they can, and then buy a real telescope.

   The funny thing is that sometimes a quality telescope does not cost any more
or much more for that matter.

    It is just sad that someone who might have had a potential interest in being an amateur astronomer
might get totally discouraged and never realize the difference between having a decent telescope
and a piece of junk might have made.

As a matter of fact, one of the worst telescopes I ever personally purchased many years ago was
made entirely of plastic.  

Even the gears  of the equatorial mount were plastic.

     It was bought from a long defunct  company called Consumers Distributing and I think I paid around $79
for it,

A total and absolute piece of junk!

The most remarkable thing about it was the operating manual.

There was a cutaway diagram of every piece and part of the telescope with a part number so you could
re-order it if it got lost or broken.

Unreal.

Want a good example of a decent quality entry level telescope at a reasonable price
with everything included that you need to get started?

Here is one:

http://khanscope.com/productdetails.cfm?productID=5570

Clear Skies,

Ray Khan

PS  This example here of a junk telescope is so bad, I could not stop laughing at the ad copy.
         https://www.dropbox.com/s/6059mfzjjodi2ue/trash%20telescope.jpg?dl=0