Vixen VMC110L Modified Cassegrain OTA

Comments about Vixen VMC110L Modified Cassegrain OTA:

Wonderful little cassegrain telescope by Vixen! hayneedle is the best as far as customer relations!

Comments about Vixen VMC110L Modified Cassegrain OTA:

I was looking for a grab and go scope that gave great clear views and I found it in the VMC110L. The scope came well collimated giving very nice views. Stars are pin points that show natural color. The flip mirror was a nice touch, I like that I can have both an illuminated recticle e.p and a longer focal length e.p in the scope at the same time for my goto alignment of my mount. It's a very light and compact scope which is a plus for travel. Also it was nice to be able to have an option on where you wanted the included universal dovetail plate to sit on the scope. It came ready to mount on my CG5-GT so I didn't have to spend more money getting it on the mount.

Some of the cons I noticed were for starters the dust cap on the front of the scope is so hard to get off and on and this is a common problem with this scope. The black area in the front of the scope that hold the secondary mirror will come loose if you twist it trying to get the cap off which could throw off the collimation. There is also some mirror flop. The image will shift when focusing which could be a pain.

All in all I am happy with my purchase. It is worth the money in my opinion because of the quality of the optics. I plan on using it for autoguiding and think it will hold up to the task.

Comments about Vixen VMC110L Modified Cassegrain OTA:

I bought this as a grab and go scope about 2 years ago mainly because of the price and the fact that it is probably the largest ap, higher focal length scope you can find that is still less than 5lbs. The main problem I have with this scope is that on bright targets, I get this sort of hazy, grainy glow around them when I start to bump the power up past 100x. The best I can do to describe the effect is to say that it resembles having the scope heavily dewed up. I don't think mine can handle anywhere near the 247x they're claiming. The highest power I've been able to use on Saturn is 125x (8mm), the view is not particularly pleasant, and getting good focus is a challenge - there's just too much glow.
This thing has a t adapter built into the straight through viewer. Using it as an overgrown manual camera lens for daylight terrestrial photography gives significant ghosting...whatever it is in the design that causes the ghosting may be the same thing responsible for my haze problem.
Some other issues this scope has are mirror slop while focusing, and the flip mirror is not of the highest quality. Viewing through the straight through yields images that are noticeably sharper.
This scope falls into a strange category...too much focal length for wide field views, not enough ap for deep sky, and since it doesn't seem to be able to reach much over 100x, not enough power for high mag viewing. This could have been a great scope, but mine just isn't...maybe I got a bad sample, but based on my experience, there are probably better options out there - keep on looking!