Tasco 4VTE 50x40mm “Asteroid” Review
I had a thing about Tasco
telescopes as a kid because the camera shop in Welwyn Garden City, where I
grew up, had a big window display full of Tasco
products every Christmas. I had the Tasco catalogue
and pored over it, memorising the specs of every telescope, every pair of binos.
My very first Tasco
Christmas present was this one (or something very similar).
I reckon lots of future astronomers
found one of these under the Christmas tree in the 1960s and 70s, so I thought
I ought to get one and review it.
At
A Glance
|
Telescope |
Tasco 4VTE ‘Asteroid’ |
|
Aperture |
40mm |
|
Focal
Length |
~500mm |
|
Focal
Ratio |
~F12 |
|
Length |
620mm |
|
Weight |
Less than
1 Kg |
Data from my own measurements!
What’s
in the Box?
All Tascos of this era shared the yellow and black box design
and came with a similar starter pack containing an introductory booklet evocatively
titled ‘Worlds Beyond’, a solar system chart with some lurid (even in the 1970s
very outdated) planetary artwork; and a Rand McNally Moon map that I searched for
landing sites during the era of Apollo.
Both booklet
and map were really good, even if that Moon map was setting up expectations the
4VTE would never live up to!
The booklet cleverly
has pictures of bigger Tasco scopes to tempt you to
upgrade; I eventually bullied mum into buying me the 3” equatorial refractor
shown.
Similar
yellow box and bumf came with every Tasco.
Love the
artwork, but ‘Mars and its Canals’ in the 1970s!?
Tasco’s Rand McNally
Moon map guided my childhood Apollo-era lunar explorations.
I eventually
owned this Tasco 3” from the ‘Worlds Beyond’ booklet.
This 4” Tasco from ‘World Beyond’ was my dream scope … aged 12. Note
the high prices quoted for big achromats like this back then.
Design
and Build
In most ways this little telescope is
typical of Japanese production from the late sixties through early eighties,
from the enamelled white tube, cast focuser and lens cell to the black crinkle
on the mount. If you’re of a certain age, these period features will likely
invoke instant nostalgia.
Not all nostalgia is bad either,
because the metal and glass construction is much more
solid than the typical toy telescopes you can buy these days, that often
feature plastic focusers (and sometimes plastic lenses too). I point that out
because this is basically a toy. For example, it has fixed magnifications
rather than interchangeable eyepieces and you can only view straight through.
Optics
The 40mm
lens is small, but at least it’s glass and achromatic and has a light blue
fluoride coating. It appears to be a cemented doublet achromat (no foil
spacers). The length of the tube suggests the objective has a focal length of
about 500mm, making it F12 or so. That should mean no false colour, but hold
that thought …
There is a
fixed eyepiece attached to a metal drawtube that allows magnification to be
varied between 25x and 50x – sensible values for a 40mm scope. The eyepiece is
probably single element - because the field of view is tiny. Despite the narrow
field, the view also curves off very sharply. False colour is just terrible,
even at 25x.
This
situation left me puzzled. The objective looks proper, but the view is pretty
horrid. So I disassembled it to see what’s going on. The
focuser actually contains several lenses to achieve the multiple powers and an upright
view, including (I think) some kind of barlow.
The crazy
and sad thing is that with all of that removed and a decent plossl
shoved in the back, the view is amazing – really sharp and virtually free of
false colour. Even the original EP is much better on its own without the
erector and barlow – still narrow of field, but
perfectly sharp.
You can’t
just permanently take out the redundant lenses either, because without them the
tube is too long to get focus.
Such a
shame, because with a simple Ramsden or Huygenian eyepiece
– the types Tasco typically bundled with its larger
models - this could have been a great little astro’
scope. That’s marketing for you – gotta have those
multiple mags and terrestrial view! As I said, it’s basically a toy. I think
they may have made an interchangeable eyepiece version – if so, it might be an
interesting table-top classic.
Variable
powers don’t improve the view.
Tube
Externally,
the tube looks nice: hard white enamel, with a black focuser and cast cell held
in by three chrome screws as usual.
Somebody
threw in a baffle and half-heartedly spattered it with black spray paint. If
you wanted to improve it, there’s plenty of shiny metal in there worth buying a
can of matte black to cover.
Focuser
The focuser
has an enamelled metal body and chromed metal drawtube. It’s very well made.
But the drawtube is too narrow even for 0.965” eyepieces, so no possibility of
converting it.
Mounting
Back in the
day, all small Japanese refractors of this era had the same design of yoke
mount with a couple of pivots to allow movement (you couldn’t call them
bearings). Larger scopes had the black crinkle-finish yoke on a wooden tripod;
here it’s a spindly chrome-legged table-top job. The legs are too short for astro’ use – you’d need to hang the eyepiece end off the
table to get near the zenith.
I recently
saw one for sale that had been enterprisingly modified to put the yoke on a
photo tripod. The effort would have been better spent on a new focuser and a
proper eyepiece.
The crinkle-black
yoke mount is classic Tasco, but pretty wobbly.
Accessories
In
Use – Daytime
In the
daytime the field is oh so dim and narrow with all that pointless optical
gubbins (barlow and erector lens) left in; without
them it’s sharp and good.
In
Use – The Night Sky
General
Observing Notes
The view is
so dim, the field of view so narrow that I struggled to find much apart from
the Moon. But in the Apollo-era of the late Sixties and early Seventies, what else would you be
looking at?
The
Moon
Even with
its standard variable power eyepiece, the 4VTE shows the basic features of our
Moon – the major craters and seas. That’s likely more than a modern toy
telescope that graces department store Christmas shelves. And that view of the
Moon was enough to give me the astronomy bug, back when Moon rockets were
launching and I could imagine Buzz and Neil among those fuzzy maria and
craters.
Deep
Sky
I tried, but
it’s just too dim, even for M42.
Summary
Despite those
metal focuser knobs, this is no Takahashi, or even a Swift for that matter (no Tascos were). Nothing about the 4VTE is great, but here’s
the thing: it’s a proper telescope and it works! It has glass lenses that gave
a reasonable, if dim, view. It gives an upright image, so you can use it for
terrestrial peeks too. For astronomy it really only gives usable views of the
Moon, but you can see a few craters: as good a view as Galileo ever had, most
probably.
As it is,
it’s so limited that it’s mostly a display piece. But, oddly, the objective is
so good you could modify this with a proper focuser and period Eps to make a
wonderful little scope. It’s a job I’d like to do some day if I have time.
In the end, I
expect lots of these went back in their box on Boxing Day, only to end up on Ebay in mint condition forty years later. But, like me, enough
youngsters were doubtless inspired by a Christmas-day Moon, resting the little
tripod on Dad’s car and warmed by a turkey dinner as a snowy dusk drew down and
the fairy lights winked on in the houses around.
If like me you had a Tasco as a child (maybe as a Christmas present) and fondly
remember the box and accessories, the style and excitement of it, but don’t
want something big cluttering the house, this little scope is a perfect
nostalgia piece, easily and cheaply found.
