The ground board (or table board, more accurately) includes a mounting screw for a standard photo tripod (as pictured), though you’ll need a fairly beefy tripod to make use of it. The Orion SkyScanner 100mm doesn’t come with a tripod. While it’s designed to be a tabletop telescope, a tripod can be essential for outdoor use.

While the Orion SkyScanner 100mm is marketed as an ideal beginner’s telescope, it can also serve as a handy grab-and-go telescope for more advanced users. You didn’t tell me what eyepiece you were trying to use or what magnification you are trying to achieve. If you are trying to get over 100X the atmospheric conditions may not be good enough to support that level of magnification with this scope. The telescope comes with two eyepieces (20mm and 10mm) for varying magnifying power and an EZ Finder II red dot finder to help locate objects in the night sky.The Kellner eyepieces are much better than the trash supplied with most cheap beginner telescopes. They generally show very clear, sharp views, and have acceptable eye relief and field of view. They’re not spectacular, but they’re all you need to get started. The Orion SkyScanner comes with two 4-element eyepieces of 20mm and 10mm. The 20mm eyepiece provides a magnification of 20x, perfect for wide field views that showcase extended objects like nebulae and larger star clusters. An ideal entry-level reflector telescope with 100mm parabolic primary mirror optics – no plastic lenses as found in some other telescopes made for beginners Also, it might not satisfy the needs of those looking for long-range deep space exploration due to its limited focal length. NOTE: The SkyScanner is a reflector type telescope, and reflectors are not recommended for daytime terrestrial viewing because the image in the eyepiece is not right-side up. But reflector telescopes make great astronomical instruments, because there is no "right side up" in space!

Of course this may still be an issue for some users after having the device for a good period of time What Do The Orion SkyScanner’s Specifications Mean?

If you started your journey into astronomy using binoculars and this would be your first telescope, you will enjoy having this wide field of view capability. If you were to add a 25 mm Plossl eyepiece to your eyepiece set, you would get a view as wide as 3 degrees, which is wide enough to take in almost all of the Andromeda Galaxy. Most telescopes cannot do this. Its theoretical max magnification will be around 200x although real world usage will place it around 150x, nevertheless this kind of performance on a budget device is still very reasonable.

The Orion SkyScanner 100mm has a relatively short focal length of approximately 400mm. This results in a fast focal ratio of f/4.0, allowing for a wide field of view. Uranus and Neptune as blue disc like shape without any details (at around peak magnification as well) The Moon: Using the SkyScanner 100 on the Moon produces great results with the included eyepieces. The image is clean and sharp. Again, I used the 10 mm with my 2X Barlow to observe the Moon. I had good surface detail and the edges of the moon were crisp with no chromatic aberration. The Moon is usually the target that I can get the highest magnification and still have a good image. That is because it is close and so bright. So I took it up to 149X using a 2.5X Barlow and an Explore Scientific 6.7 mm 82 degree eyepiece. The image was pretty good, but getting into precise focus was difficult. The focuser does not do well when fine adjustments are needed, as is required at high magnification. So I am going to say that I feel the scope tops out somewhere around 150X for this reason. A range of essential accessories is thoughtfully included in the Orion SkyScanner 100mm. These carefully curated additions complement the telescope’s capabilities, enhancing your astronomical endeavors.The Orion SkyScanner 100mm offers a captivating stargazing experience, revealing a rich tapestry of celestial wonders such as: Lunar craters The position of the focuser, finderscope, and dovetail is not ideal, because it puts the eyepiece on the top of the telescope. If you point the telescope very near the horizon, the eyepiece is placed far forward and up at the top, meaning you must stand and bend over the telescope to look through it. If you point the telescope up high near the zenith, the eyepiece is pointed horizontally, so you must sit down and look forward.

The Sky-Watcher Heritage 150P, as well as the slightly smaller Heritage 130P both have even more performance than a 114mm reflector and deliver significantly better views of the Moon, planets and deep-sky objects (130mm or bigger scopes can resolve globular star clusters or detail on Mars, for instance). The collapsible tube design of both Heritage models lends itself well to portability and storage, too. Perfect reflector telescope for wide-angle, low-power viewing of the Milky Way and other deep sky objects when viewing from relatively dark skiesThe Orion StarBlast II 4.5 EQ uses the same larger and adjustable primary mirror as the Z114 with otherwise similar performance and features but it comes mounted atop a spindly full-sized EQ-1 equatorial mount and tripod. Despite its compact size, the SkyScanner 100mm TableTop Reflector boasts a 100mm (3.9″) aperture parabolic glass primary mirror that captures ample faint light, enabling you to view the Moon’s cratered surface, bright planets, and even distant deep-space nebulas in sharp detail. Short focal length I have also tested the SkyScanner 100 with other eyepieces, including my Explore Scientific 14, 8.8, and 6.7 mm 82-degree eyepieces. All worked well in the little scope.