Binoculars and other Disappointments

 Well, we finally had a clear enough night to allow me to properly test the Celestron Skywatcher 20x80 binoculars. Sadly, they have proved to be faulty.

Having worked out that to mount them on the threaded fitting of the telescopes tripod required the removal of the 70mm 'scope's OTA (Optical Tube Assembly) and the rotating of the binos onto the mount, as neither the binos threaded fitting or the tripods fitting could be actually 'screwed', i was finally in a position to take a look at some suitable astronomical targets - Mars and the Moon.

Well, the collimation error is such that the two images were out of alignment by around a third of the width of the moons image! To make things worse, this was the vertical alignment - horizontal collimation can (on older, not brand new!) binos be sorted with Conditional Alignment. Mars was two totally separate planets!

So, these are going back! I guess this is where I find out just how good the customer service at Carmarthen Cameras is!The Amazon return system only gave me a refund option, not a repair/replace, and no pre-paid shipping, so im going to be out yet another tenner (on top of the extra tenner that the bloody binos cost in the first place!) in sending them back.

Another disappointment this week was to find that my missing bottle of Zolcal-D to treat Grace for he soft shelled eggs, is clearly never going to arrive! The seller hwes-758 racked up almost 400 negative feedback in the last month alone, and most of their positives were actually complaints! They are now ive just seen no longer a registered user. I can only think that they have been running some sort of interest rate scam - hold the money until forced to refund, if you do that with enough peoples money you make on the interest, although i cant see it being an effective scam at the present bank rates! Looking at other listings for this product, it looks like they are playing this game with several user names!

So, while I await ebay refunding me (have to wait until wednesday!) I ordered it from Amazon for a couple of quid more and it arrived next day!