by Julius Szakacs
I just bought this 8x32x50mm zoom binocular on Ebay ($58), Khan scope from Canada was auctioning it. Brand is OPTECK, Made in China, never heard of it. Searching on the net, nothing comes up under this name. It is suprisingly sharp.
Last night I stayed up till 4 am in the morning so I can see the planets and the rising Jupiter.
Zoom bino was mounted on a parallelogram mount.
The full moon was very bright and zooming in 32x (1.6 deg field), I was able to see many surface features on the planet, in 3D. I was impressed, this bino is sharp.
Splitting Albiro was easy at 20x and after tweaking the zoom and diopter adjustment, stars came to a sharp blue and gold color dot, floating in blackness. Very nice.
Moving to Saturn, at 3am, was fairly high next to Orion. Using 20x magnification, it showed an oblong orange spot, but zooming to 32x, ring and the planet showed it's classical feature. No Cassiny division visible, but clearly can see Saturn, like on photographs. WOW!!!
Now, let see the Orion nebula. Holding the same power, it showed lot of nebulosity, even with the full Moon beaming down not far away. I can see 3 stars clearly in the trapezium. Nice.
Jupiter came up, maybe 10 deg above the horizon, over the roof tops. I was able to see an orange disk and four moons, no surface feature. I think if it would be higher in the sky, would show more, since I noticed some heat waves disturbance.
I'm very impressed with this small binocular that fits into my coat pocket and able to split some of the double stars and shows so much on planets.
At high power, over 16x it needs a mount, it's hard keep it study, at 32x all most impossible.
Any one tried or own one of these Oberwerk 12x36x70 zoom binoculars for planetary observation? It has much more light geathering. than the 50mm. How good are they? On it's website states, "Not recomended for astronomy".
How about mine??!!! (-: