Skywatcher Evostar-80ED DS-PRO Apochromatic Refractor 80 mm f/600 OTA Black

What else is there to say? You would need to spend 4 or 5 times the price of this SkyWatcher ED80-DS Pro to get anything that would out perform it at 80mm. If there's one slight weakness, it's the focuser. Think about spending some of what you've saved by buying this, on a decent focuser upgrade at some time in the future. Definitely a 'keeper' - you'll never want to part with these optics. A great pity that the "less than favourable" comments in the reviews here, seem to relate to the delivery and the unimpressive case - neither of which should detract from this 'scope being one of the finest currently available.

I bought this OTA with the purpose of using it solely for wide field astrophotography. I was impressed straight away with how sharp the images were through the scope. It is well worth the money and I cannot recommend it enough. It is well constructed and I was especially pleased with the dual speed focuser. The field of view is wide enough to capture most of the larger night sky objects like the Andromeda Galaxy ( picture uploaded). Great little scope for the money.

i bought this telescope as a ota without any accessories as i already had lot's of eyepieces star diagonal and finderscope. barring none this is the best value with fl 53 and schott glass,the same telescope sold by other brands would cost so much more.some years back i had the celestron ed80 which were the same as the skywatcher then ed80 pro,but this new skywatcher is light years above both of them, the improvement is nothing short of stunning by the way skywatcher is the parent company of celestron.i still can't believed I only paid £350.00 for it,a stripped down version with no extras only the aluminium carry case.so if you already have your own eyepieces etc.etc i paid over twice as much for my ed spotting scope nowhere near as good as this telescope.

This was my first ED/APO refractor, which I got mainly for astrophotography. Well, it turns out it is amazing for visual observing as well, giving you extremely sharp wide-field views at a portable package. Due to its higher contrast and color It blows away Maksutovs during the day and even at night you need a reflector / catadioptric of more than twice the aperture to actually get better views. Sure, for faint deep space objects like galaxies & nebulae aperture is king, but I am saying I bought this as a complement to a big reflector just for astrophotography and I ended up using it quite a lot visually.As for astrophotography, there is simply nothing as good at this price. Even though it is just a doublet, the CA is well controlled probably thanks to the high quality FPL-53 optics and the fact that it is only medium-speed at f/7.5. For the speed issue, there is a matched reducer/corrector that turns it into f/6.375 which is not too expensive (and you'll want it if you are serious about astrophotography). Usually the focuser is mentioned as its weakness and if you want to hang over half a kilo of equipment on it it requires some adjustment to increase its grip, but a better focuser by itself costs more than half the price of this package.Speaking of package, it is certainly not worth getting the OTA-only version, so make sure you are getting the full package which contains a nice aluminum case, a good quality 2" dielectric diagonal, the popular 9x50 skywatcher finderscope, mounting rings and a 2" 28mm LET eyepiece (actually nicer than most included eyepieces that come with telescopes).Astrobin is full of deep space astrophotos with this scope, but for reference I am attaching the very first Jupiter pic I shot through it using a Canon 550D (60s movie crop mode).Update: I added a better one of Jupiter using a 3x TeleVue barlow, and the first deep-space I tried with this (from the city, few exposures, not that great).Update 2: Added a lunar, comet Lovejoy and a relatively nice (for an urban location) M33 galaxy...