When Joshua Roth and I wrote our review of three $100 telescopes in Sky & Telescope's March 2011 issue, there were some topics that we would like to have discussed that lend themselves better to show-and-tell than to the written page — and one of those is explaining how to use the telescopes.

The two table-top scopes that we reviewed are pretty self-explanatory, but the same is not true of the Orion SpaceProbe 3 Altazimuth Reflector, an old-fashioned design that used to be ubiquitous, but may seem strange to some modern stargazers. So we prepared the video below to explain some of the telescope's less obvious features.

One of my co-workers, on viewing this video, commented that I talked only about the negative aspects of the telescopes. That's true, but only because the telescope's good aspects — which far outweigh the bad — speak for themselves. Rest assured that both Josh and I thoroughly enjoyed using all three scopes while we were testing them, and recommend them heartily to anybody who wants a high-quality, inexpensive telescope.