Great starter outfit featuring the Skylux 80 refracting telescope - now only £139.99 inc delivery anywhere in the UK This great kit features the Skylux 80mm refractor and all the basic accessories and information needed to get anyone, young or old, started in the fascinating hobby of astronomy!

The Skylux 80 is a serious starter scope for the user who demands more. Its large 80mm optics achieve a light-grasp superior to any other refractor in its class.

The Skylux 80 is an ideal scope to get a serious start 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 Skylux 80 are two excellent eyepieces (see below for full specification) giving a useful range of magnifications from high to medium and lower power (wide-angle). The instruction manual will have you set up and ready to observe in just a few minutes first night out. If this is not enough guidance we have included TV astronomer Robin Scagell's Stargazing with a Telescope. This 192-page fully illustrated book is a great read and will guide the new telescope user in the methods of telescopic observation. It also introduces many of the fantastic targets that can be seen from UK back gardens. We've also included (see FREE offer above) a wall map, a year-round star finder guide and the indispensable 290mm (11.5") Planisphere.

FREE Philip's Planisphere(see lowermost picture for detail) The perfect tool to identify the stars and constellations from your back-garden any hour of the night. (Every astronomer I know has one of these gadgets - mine dates back to the 70's and has been left out overnight more times than I can remember and aside from a few teeth marks - no not mine - but the full extent of the scientific curiosity of hedgehogs I suspect - it's as good as new still! James SnS). It's probably the most popular sky and star guide in the world and most astronomers discover it after they get a telescope - we are making sure you get one of these excellent companions with your new scope. (the Planisphere normally sells for £7.99 on it's own!)

To help find your way among the stars and constellations there's a superb 6x optical finder with a unique feature that lets you flip the finder for left or right eyed viewing. In fact, all you will need to supply is a clear night!

Telescope specifications

Primary lens: Air-spaced achromatic doublet

Focal length: 700mm

Aperture: 80mm (f10)

Magnification with supplied eyepieces: 6mm = 117 20mm = 35x

Mounting: German equatorial with dual-axis manual slow motions

So what's so great about the Skylux 80 telescope kit?

The Skylux 80 is a great "classic" astronomy telescope. It has a good-sized aperture of 80mm - that's well over three inches (the telescope size recommended by Patrick Moore) 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 Skylux 80 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 that can be switched for right or left eyed use (to make pointing and target finding easy) and a the quick-release shoe fitting and the rigid -screw 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 Skylux 80 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 Skylux 80

What can you see with the Skylux 80?

The telescope has a bigger aperture than most models in its class and its superior light gathering power (over the 70mm version) will allow mush fainter targets to be seen. 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. Its when it comes to the observation of very remote and faint targets like galaxies and nebulea that the 80mm aperture of this great scope begins to put the competition in the shade. The superior light grasp will allow targets to be seen that would be invisible in smaller aperture scopes. These are just a few of the 1000s of targets that can be seen with the Skylux 80 telescope.