This high quality day & night use telescope from Sky Watcher, is an ideal stargazing starter scope and is one of the few that also performs brilliantly as a normal terrestrial (wildlife, shipping etc) telescope - now only £104.99 inc UK mainland delivery and all the basic accessories needed to get anyone, young or old, started in the fascinating hobby of astronomy!

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The Sky Watcher Mercury 705 day and night telescope is an ideal hybrid instrument for night-time astronomy and day-time high-powered terrestrial viewing. The 705 comes supplied with a well-engineered all-metal mounting with fully geared manual slow-motion hand controls on each axis and a full-height aluminium field tripod.

Click the link below to see our video presentation of this telescope:

Video demo of the Mercury 705 telescope

Supplied with the Sky Watcher Mercury 705 are two excellent eyepieces - 10mm and 25mm with fold down soft rubber eye-cups (see below for full specification) giving a useful range of magnifications from medium to high power. Also included is a prismatic all glass erecting diagonal for terrestrial and astronomical viewing. The instruction manual (in well-written English by the way) is fully illustrated and will have you set up and ready to observe in just a few minutes.

Telescope specifications

Primary lens: Air-spaced achromatic doublet

Focal length: 500mm

Aperture: 70mm (f7)

Magnification with supplied eyepieces: 10mm = 50x, 25mm = 20x

Mounting: full sized altazimuth with dual-axis manual slow-motion controls

So what's so great about the Sky Watcher Mercury 705 telescope kit?

The Mercury 705 is a great "classic" 70mm 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 705 is a well-made scope - at our price it's extraordinary value for money. The telescope is well equipped with a state-of-the-art electronic red dot finder (to make pointing and target finding easy day or night).

The included AZ-3 mount and tripod is a brilliant innovation allowing the telescope to be used terrestrially in daytime (for distant target viewing) and also to smoothly track targets in the night sky, at the turn of a knob - be sure to watch our video demonstration of this feature. The 705 can be upgraded and added to in many different ways.

For example, it has a standard 1.25" eyepiece holder (regarded by the telescope industry 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 wildlife and astro-photography), 2x Barlows, to greatly increase magnification with each eyepiece as well as wide range of specialist eyepieces. A safe Solar observation filter is also available for 705.

What can you see with the Mercury 705?

At medium power the Moon becomes a fabulously intricate landscape of craters, rays and rills. At higher power individual crater systems can be explored. The planet Mars will show numerous details on its surface and the polar cap can be seen during ideal observing conditions.

At good observing times, when observed at just 50x magnification using the included 10mm eyepiece, the planet Jupiter will appear as a banded disc larger in size than you normally see the full Moon with the unaided eye! In ideal viewing conditions, detail can be seen in the violent atmosphere of this greatest of the gas giants that can be observed in motion on the planet's disk 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 - they too can be see to clearly move and change position in just 20 minutes of observing. And don't forget these are all things that you cannot possibly see with the un-aided eye (unless you actually go there that is!).

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 Mercury telescope.