Great starter outfit featuring the Bresser 70 refracting telescope - now only £99.99 inc delivery anywhere in the UK and all the basis accessories needed to get anyone, young or old, started in the fascinating hobby of astronomy!

The Bresser 70 is an ideal scope to get started in astronomy (a lot better than my first scope! James) and comes supplied with a well-engineered German equatorial mounting with fully geared manual slow-motion hand controls on each axis and a rigid steel tripod (just the tripod is amazing and looks like it would cost £70 to £100 on its own!). Supplied with the Bresser 70 are three excellent eyepieces - 4mm, 12mm and 20mm (see below for full specification) giving a useful range of magnifications from high to medium and lower power (wide-angle). The excellent instruction manual (in well-written English!) is illustrated with full-colour pictures that will have you set up and ready to observe in just a few minutes first night out.

Telescope specifications

Primary lens: Air-spaced achromatic doublet

Focal length: 700mm

Aperture: 70mm (f10)

Magnification with supplied eyepieces: 4mm = 175x, 12mm = 58x, 20mm = 35x

Mounting: German equatorial with dual-axis manual slow motions

So what's so great about the Bresser 70 telescope kit?

The Bresser 70 is a great "classic" astronomy telescope. It has a good-sized aperture (70mm) to achieve high resolution images, and has a useful long focal length to achieve high magnifications without making the telescope too difficult to use.

At two or three times the price, the Bresser 70 is a well-made scope - at our price it's extraordinary value for money. The telescope is well equipped with a good quality wide-field finder scope (to make pointing and target finding easy) and a the quick-release shoe fitting and the two-screw spring-loaded collimation system shows a nice attention to detail and user convenience. The equatorial mount can be upgraded with an RA motor to track the stars - far too many lower-cost scopes offer no kind of upgrade path and if you really get bitten by the hobby (and you may well with this scope) with inferior instruments you have nowhere to go but to buy a new scope. In fact, Scopes'n'Skies main forte is supplying astronomy telescope accessories and the Bresser 70 can be upgraded and added to in many different ways. For example, it has a standard 1.25" eyepiece holder (regarded as the hallmark of a serious telescope) allowing a wide range of additional accessories to be attached. These accessories include camera adaptors (to try your hand at astro-photography), 2x and 3x Barlows (to increase the magnification without using short, difficult to use, eyepieces), as well as wide-angle and higher-powered specialist eyepieces and other accessories to make the telescope easier to use on terrestrial targets. A Solar observation filter is also available for the Bresser 70.

What can you see with the Bresser 70?

At low to medium power the Moon becomes a fabulously intricate landscape of craters, rays and rills. At higher powers individual crater systems can be explored. The planet Mars will show many details on its surface and the polar cap can be seen during ideal observing conditions. At good observing times, when observed at just 50x or higher magnification, the planet Jupiter will appear as a banded disc larger in size than you normally see the full Moon with the unaided eye! The cloud belts of Jupiter will show ever changing detail that will show drift accross the planet's face in just a few minutes. The four main moons of Jupiter will be seen orbiting the giant planet, sometimes casting shadows onto Jupiter's dense cloudy atmosphere. The planet Saturn will show its magnificent ring system and its bright famous moon Titan. These are just a few of the things that can be seen in our own solar system with the Bresser 70 telescope.