We’ve all looked up at the night sky and wondered what those lights really look like up close. Stars, planets, the craters on the moon – they’re all up there, waiting to be explored but telescopes have always seemed either too expensive or too complicated to bother with.
The Hexeum beginner telescope just dropped to $85 from $149 on Amazon, and brings real astronomy within reach of anyone curious enough to point it at the sky. This isn’t a toy telescope that shows you blurry dots, it’s an 80mm aperture refractor with actual quality optics, two real eyepieces and a Barlow lens that magnifies the moon up to 180 times.
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Optics That Show You Something Worth Seeing
With an aperture of 80mm, it captures much more light compared to smaller and entry-level scopes which will directly translate into a view that is brighter and clearer of the night’s starry objects. The focal length of 600mm at f/6.7 gives a balance between the wide-field views for star clusters and closer views of planets and the moon. Fully multi-coated lenses mean reduced light loss and increased brightness and clarity in the image so instead of a washed-out blob, you’re actually seeing sharp detail.
Right out of the box, the two eyepieces give you flexibility: The 25mm eyepiece gives 24x magnification, perfect for scanning the sky to find objects or viewing larger targets like the Andromeda Galaxy or the Pleiades star cluster. The 10mm eyepiece bumps you up to 60x magnification for detailed views of the moon’s craters, Jupiter’s bands or Saturn’s rings. The 3x Barlow lens triples the magnifying power of each eyepiece and pushes you to 72x and 180x when you want to zoom in even closer.
The adjustable aluminum tripod holds the telescope steady during viewing which is more important than one might think. Any shimmy or wobble gets magnified along with the image and turns the planets into jittery blurs. Sturdy construction means you don’t have to fight vibrations every time you touch the scope, so smooth focusing isn’t a problem. A phone adapter lets you snap photos of what you see by mounting your smartphone onto the eyepiece and turns casual star-gazing into shareable moments.
For $85, you’re paying what some people spend on a nice dinner for a tool that opens up an entirely new hobby. The lifetime maintenance support means you’re covered if anything goes wrong, and the responsive customer service handles questions within 24 hours. This telescope gives you real views of real astronomical objects-the phases of Venus, the moons of Jupiter orbiting in real-time, the rings of Saturn and countless star clusters.
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