JMI began by developing and providing quality accessories for the amateur astronomy market in 1983. In the late 1980's they began manufacturing large aperture telescopes.
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There are only a two telescopes by this manufacturer that makes it into our less than $5000 category. The NGT-12.5 was introduced in 1996. This is an astonishing telescope for the money. The optical system is a 12.5" f/4.5 Newtonian truss tube design with a rotating nose assembly for comfortable viewing. It has a 2" low profile focuser, 8x50 finder, computer with over 300 objects and is mounted on a split ring equatorial mount with a DC drive in both axes. The drive is capable of four tracking rates, guiding and slewing rates and had periodic error correction. All of this is in a package that weighs about 100 lbs and can be broken down and carried in a large back seat. When you find these on the used market it is usually because someone is upgrading to a larger model of the same telescope. | |
| NGT 12.5" | ||
| The NGDob 12.5 was introduced in 1997 which is a much simpler version of the above model with similar optics. This unit was a very light and portable aluminum truss-tube Dobsonian telescope with a composite rocker. It included a 2" focuser, Telrad and 1 ¼" eyepiece. | ||