On 12/01/2017 16:04, wrote:
On Thursday, January 12, 2017 at 6:40:21 AM UTC-5, Martin Brown wrote:

It was easily outclassed by a 4" refractor or an 8"
SCT both present.

No doubt, one could use a magnifying glass or other simple lenses, to contrive a 4-inch refractor.

It did a lot better on faint fuzzies but the very poor collimation still
meant that stars were not exactly round even at low magnification.

Support that mirror properly, collimate the scope and then get back to us.

Light buckets are made down to a very low price for people who just want
loads of aperture and don't much care about anything else.

Explore Scientific's kit is probably a lot better than that but the
majority of fast Newtonians I have seen are very much built to the maxim
of "never mind the quality feel the width".

Even with a perfect one though you still have a whopping great central
obstruction if it is designed to illuminate a 2" wide field eyepiece.
I noticed you deliberately failed to comment on that.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown