Home > Consumer Reviews > Bushnell Voyager 100mm x 4.5" Family Reflector Telescope

Bushnell Voyager 78-2010 (a good clone of the Edmund Astroscan)

Since Edmund Optics sold Edmund Scientific, the Astroscan has got a cheap China face lift. The body of the famous Astroscan is now cheap and the optics are not worthy of the originals. The Astroscan was made in the USA in in the 1970's, then Japan and finally China.

I have the US Astroscan from 1980 and this Bushnell Voyager (a clone) that got a bad name when it was introduced.

The Bushnell Voyager is a great scope, Made in the Philippines. It is well made and can be adjusted where the Astroscan cannot.

This model is Old Stock not on Bushnell's Website.

I mean this to be more of an endorsement than it may seem. This scope has been villified repeatedly because:

1) It's made by Bushnell;
2) It has a spherical mirror; and
3) It's a copy of a scope (The AstroScan) that many folks cut their teeth on.

When the scope is out of collimation, stars present as gull wings, and this effect is automatically attributed to the spherical mirror, because Bushnell is the big bad guy among astrosnobs. Here's the good news: You can adjust the thing when this happens, and the gull wings go away. If you get an out-of-collimation AstroScan, the darling of the astrosnobs, there ain't nothin' you can do about it. (Heh! I gotta expect a lot of 'unhelpful' votes because of comments like this.)

This is a wide-field, low power scope. Period. Outfit it with eyepieces from the AstroScan, and you have yourself a nice casual picnic table telescope. Collimate it and crank it up to ~60X, and you get a very nice view of the sky - somewhere between a binocular and a telescope. (Search at about 15 X) In the Northern Hemisphere you can use it to see (among other things):

1) The Moon
2) The rings of Saturn
3) The moons of Jupiter. You'll even see a couple of belts on Jupiter
4) The phases of venus
5) Open clusters galore
6) The Dumbbell Nebula
7) The Andromeda Galaxy
8) The Lagoon Nebula
9) A bunch of globular clusters - though only as blurry balls
10) Comets, as they come around
11) The Great Nebula In Orion

Is it pro quality? No. If what you have is $... it's not a bad way to spend that. IMHO, the Orion StarBlast (a similar instrument) beats it squarely for ~$...dollars more. I've compared the Bushnell side by side with the new AstroScan, though, and the Bushnell comes out well ahead. The difference isn't subtle.

It's biggest disadvantage is decidedly negative snob appeal.