My First Telescope: The Bushnell Voyager 100x4.5 "Bong Scope"

Time to tell you of the story of my first telescope.

I was never super into visual astronomy as a kid. Dunno why. Maybe it was a combination of suburban light pollution, poor vision which often went uncorrected, and a really disappointing experience with a lunar eclipse in first or second grade (they show the eclipsed moon as being so red on tv! I was expecting a colorful show! My second total eclipse, the January 2019 one, was a lot more fun since I knew what to expect). I appreciated the Moon in the sky, and I could identify one (1) constellation, or rather, an asterism within it: Orion's Belt (for some reason not his body, though).

But I have always been into astronomy as knowledge and theory, if not observational astronomy. I'd always loved learning about space, through library books and documentaries. But by my teen years, I liked spaceflight more than space itself. This can largely be blamed on the video game Kerbal Space Program, and it wasn't until I started making planet mods for Kerbal Space Program that I gained a strong interest in planetary science again.

Golly it must have been spring or summer 2016? The summer before my high school / community college General Astronomy class. I don't remember the specifics, but I guess telescopes had been on my mind because I knew of my college's public observatory, which would become more relevant with the astronomy class looming ahead. I found out that my Dad used to have a telescope, which Mom got him for Christmas 1997 or 1998. Apparently they had no luck with it, they only ever saw their eye reflected back to them, so they said. At some point I was told that we still had the telescope, it was somewhere in the shed. I bolted out to try to find it.

The telescope was the Bushnell Voyager 100x4.5, a knock-off of the Edmund AstroScan, using a 4.5" f=500mm Newtonian optical tube in a ball-and-cradle mount. Such telescopes are no longer sold. It had two eyepieces, a 27mm and a 5mm, of an unknown optical layout (I suspect an RKE and a traditional Kellner), providing 18.5x and 100x respectively. I probably never used the 5mm until much later, not knowing how eyepiece magnification was supposed to work.

It was a tabletop telescope, but I had no table or chair for it. I think I had it perched on the porch steps, with me sitting on the step below it, or perhaps I simply sat all the way on the floor with it. I pointed it at Jupiter--though I don't know whether or not I knew which planet it was beforehand, I suppose by that point I knew that very bright, untwinkling stars must be planets. When I found it, and saw that it had four little dots all inline, I think there might have been some expletives, and there was definitely enthusiastic shouting! The moons! I can see the moons!

Unfortunately my home is not well suited for astronomy. Too many trees. So I didn't use the telescope all that often. I don't remember using it on the Moon, though I'm sure I must have... hmm... I feel like I'd have remembered my first look at the Moon through a telescope. Weird that I don't. I remember using it on Saturn and being able to tell it was an elongated elliptical object, but I couldn't clearly split the rings. If only I'd known to try the 5mm eyepiece!

The first time I visited the Cline Observatory, I brought my Bushnell Voyager with me and set it up outside on the bench at the observing pad. There I looked through an 8" SCT at the Lagoon Nebula, and at the beautiful cloud banding and moons of Jupiter through the Observatory's 24" CDK. Less than a year later I started volunteering at the Cline Observatory, and shortly thereafter took the Observational Astronomy class which qualified me to operate the 24" CDK and mount.

I received an... """"upgrade"""" to the Bushnell Voyager. I didn't realize at the time, but it turned out not to be an upgrade, really. The Celestron AstroMaster 114EQ. (Do not buy this telescope.) It had the same aperture as the Bushnell Voyager. Its claims of double the focal length came only due to an extra lens incorrectly mounted in the focuser. Its equatorial mount looked cool and scientific and serious, but I didn't understand how it worked until much later and it was very wobbly and frustrating to use. Alas, I gave away the easier to use Bushnell Voyager to my friend as a Christmas present.

Last year (late 2019) I picked the telescope, which my friend never ended up using much, back up. I drove it home, eager to use it, having by then realized that it was better than I thought. I was going to try to clean the optical window, and my heart broke moments after the glass did, striking the floor. After I calmed down from my ensuing panic, I realized that I could still mount the remaining glass, necessary to hold the secondary mirror in place, in the telescope tube.

When I first started doing sidewalk astronomy, about two weeks before the COVID-19 outbreak rendered this impossible, I brought the Voyager with me. The first person to come look through was skeptical at first. "Come look at the moon!" I said. They strayed away from me, trying to orbit around to get inside without getting too close. "Come on, take a look at the moon through this telescope," I insisted.

Bong Scope 100x4.5, showing damage to the optical window.

"Oh!" He said. "I thought that was a bong!" and he took a look.

It does rather look like one, doesn't it?

With the broken optical window, it actually has a mild advantage--resistance to dew. There's always a part of the field of view of the eyepiece which is not murky when the telescope dews up. But after reassembling the telescope, I never properly collimated it. I tried to do so, a few months ago, and only made it worse. It's difficult to star-collimate the telescope because you can't lock down the mount, it'll easily roll around while you're trying to work the hex screws.

I finally collimated it a few weeks ago using a new Cheshire collimating eyepiece. Primary collimation seems a little out, but surprisingly good. The image is only perfectly sharp when the focus is perfectly right, otherwise there's a subtle split image from the optical window and the open air throwing up slightly different images.

I used it early on the morning of September 8th on the Sword of Orion, the Moon, and the Double Cluster in Perseus. Attractive views in all, though while the 27mm eyepiece provides an excellent field of view for finding objects, it really needs a better way to do the initial rough aiming. I can't get my head behind the tube to line anything up. What I need is a unit finder, at least a peep-sight or something. And given my smaller telescopes at higher powers (FirstScope & Galileoscope) performed better on the Great Nebula in Orion, I think it's best to use it with mid-power eyepieces at least some of the time, rather than forcing all DSOs into tiny patches of nebulosity. 

The 27mm eyepiece is really very nice in field of view and eye relief. For a long time I didn't know what it was (I thought it was a Kellner, as a Plossl would be longer), until I read about the 28mm RKE supplied with the Edmund AstroScan, which the Voyager 100x4.5 is a knock-off of. It's a short eyepiece like the one I've got, and people describe its wide field of view and almost floating stars look to it. Now I'm pretty sure the 27mm is a Rank-Kellner Eyepiece. I did all my scanning on September 8th AM with the 27mm eyepiece, and I didn't try anything else until the next evening, when I went out to try the 5mm eyepiece.

5mm delivers bad planetary performance but I'm almost entirely sure that's down to the broken glass window rather than the optics themselves. It's the same kind of blobby spiky view of planets I get with the FirstScope, but I don't think the Voyager has a spherical mirror (I could be wrong). Jupiter's band was just barely visible, Saturn's rings could be split with a 15mm goldline but not with the 27mm, and with the 5mm it was a fuzzy mess but I could split the rings and see Titan. The 5mm is not optically super poor either, it seems to perform about as well as my 6mm Kellner, which utilized in my 6" f/8 dob has always worked fine for planets. Probably the best use of the Voyager is as oversized binoculars, and thus it isn't well suited to moonlit nights or city light pollution. As it is now, it's not very well suited to planets, and I really hope that's mostly by the fault of the broken glass, something I could in principle fix, and not simply due to a bad primary mirror. A very simple star collimation check showed that the primary is in pretty good collimation.

The only trouble is its eyepieces and focuser are ever so slightly larger than 1.25". So I can't use the really quite spectacularly wide-field 27mm RKE(?) in other telescopes, and other eyepieces wobble within the Voyager's focuser.

One day I'd like to replace the broken optical window of the Voyager with a spider strut. Maybe a single-vane curved spider to try to preserve the diffraction-spikes-free view. Would probably be better than trying to find a replacement optical window. In the near term, I need to figure out how to mount a finder.

So I think my first telescope has rather redeemed itself as a nice aesthetic-observing-mode instrument, at least until the dew forms. If I do end up just replacing the optical window, I should be sure to construct a dew shield, hopefully one that looks nice enough to use.