Home > Consumer Reviews > Orion Apex 102mm Maksutov-Cassegrain Telescope

I bought this recently to expand the Long Island Sound waterviews visible from near my house. It works very well for that. The 40mm eye piece works best, although I have the 14mm and 25mm as well. Those work, but the images is just a bit wavy in daylight images. The size is compact and the build quality is nice. It comes with a very nice carrying case.

I got this a month ago, and have absolutely no regrets. The quality of built is excellent: it feels solid, with no cheap pieces. The quality of images are just as good as other cassegrain telescopes that I have had a chance to look at. I can see the moons off of Jupiter, and can barely see the storm's spot. However, the scope as sold only has a magnification of 52x (1300 focal length and 25mm eye piece), so with a shorter eye piece, I imagine that you can get much more details and larger images. Portability is great. Terrific buy!

I have owned both this scope and it's little brother, Orion's 90mm Mak. This one has all the same good points as its sibling and one less bad point; the tiny hokey finder from the smaller Mak is replaced on this scope with something that is actually useful and mounted well out on a stalk so you can look through it without banging your head. The 45-degree prism diagonal is the same: acceptable for daytime use, well worth replacing with a 90-degree mirror diagonal, even a cheap one, for astronomical use.

That said, I find that I use the 90mm scope more and I'm probably going to sell this one. I got this one because I have a weakness for Maks and because I thought the extra aperture would be worth it. It's not, for me at least. I already have a big scope for sucking up photons. The whole point of a little Mak is portability, and the 90mm scope is significantly smaller and lighter. I use it more for grab-n-go and more for travel, too. In my experience all of the Apex/Starmax scopes are rock-solid and well worth the money. If you're looking for one to be your only scope, I'd think hard about trading up to the 127mm version, which gathers 60% more light and will show you more stuff. On the other hand, if you're looking for a highly portable second or third scope, or a scope for birding or digiscoping, the 90mm version is small and lighter, and the light-gathering difference is only 20%.

That's pretty nit-picky, though. This a good scope and the extra pounds and inches it sports over its little brother are only going to be an issue if you're really minding weight and volume for travel. Even so, I have flown with this scope and would happily do so again...if I weren't getting rid of it. If there's a moral to all this, it's to think hard about what variables you're looking to maximize, and don't get suckered by aperture fever. Also, amazingly enough, it IS possible to have too many Maks laying around. Clear skies!