orion starblast ii 4.5 equatorial reflector telescope

Saturn’s rings, the Cassini Division, the planet’s cloud belts, and about half a dozen of its moons are visible. You can also see Jupiter’s cloud belts, the Great Red Spot and its 4 large moons. The StarBlast II’s high-quality optics will show you Mercury and Venus’ phases, along with the dark albedo patches and ice caps on Mars. If you need to rotate the tube to put the finder/eyepiece in a more convenient position, just slightly loosen the tube and rotate it in the tube rings (while being careful not to slide it forward/backward and ruin the balance).

Coarse motion is achieved by simply pushing/pulling the scope around the sky while fine adjustments are made with the two included flexible slow-motion cables. Setting up and using the EQ-1 is pretty easy-just level the tripod, put the mount/scope together, balance the scope on both axes, and roughly line up the mount’s polar axis with Polaris. It lacks a polar scope, and the setting circles on it are so small that they’re almost entirely useless, but for visual astronomy it works just fine-don’t expect it to work well for astrophotography, however. The EQ-1 is more or less a simplified version of the larger German equatorial mounts used for large telescopes and/or astrophotography. The EQ-1 mount is basically the same as the mount supplied with most of the Celestron PowerSeeker telescopes, but the StarBlast II optical tube is small and light enough to work on it quite well – and also has good enough optics that it’s worth talking about actually using it. There’s also a moon map bundled with the scope (Orion’s MoonMap 260), which is essentially just a gimmick, and a smartphone adapter that will allow you to take shots of the Moon if you so desire-though forget serious astrophotography that’s something for $2000 telescopes. The StarBlast II is supplied with a red dot sight, which is adequate for this telescope. You may want to purchase an additional 6mm “goldline” eyepiece (75x) as well as a Barlow or even shorter focal length eyepiece to get the most out of your StarBlast. The StarBlast II EQ comes with two eyepieces: a 25mm Sirius Plossl (18x) and a 10mm Sirius Plossl (45x). Thanks to the universal dovetail plate and saddle design, you can theoretically swap any scope you want onto the EQ-1 and move the StarBlast II to any other (preferably more stable) mount you want. This is an improvement over the older and lower-quality EQ-1 mounts, which just have rings bolted directly to the top the StarBlast II itself used such a system until recently. The StarBlast II’s Vixen-style dovetail plate slots into a saddle on the EQ-1 mount head. The rings allow you to rotate the tube to adjust the position of the eyepiece as well as slide it forward/backward for balancing. The StarBlast II optical tube attaches to its equatorial mount with a pair of tube rings that screw directly onto a Vixen-style dovetail plate. Orion doesn’t provide a collimation tool, but you can buy/make one or simply collimate it on a star-read our guide for more information on collimation. The scope also requires precise collimation (which it thankfully has easy-to-use, spring-loaded adjustments for, unlike some other 114mm equatorial scopes on the market). At f/4, there is some coma at the edge of the field of view with low-magnification eyepieces like the included 25mm Plossl, but even if you notice it, it shouldn’t hamper the image quality too much. The StarBlast II 4.5 EQ is a 114mm (4.5”) f/4 Newtonian reflector with a focal length of 450mm. The StarBlast II EQ uses the same optical tube as Orion’s regular StarBlast Astro but it is supplied on Orion’s EQ-1 equatorial mount instead of a tabletop Dobsonian mount and comes with much better eyepieces.

Orion starblast ii 4.5 equatorial reflector telescope