Top positive review
150 people found this helpful
Great telescope to get beginner interested in hobby
By CW5_Reviewer on Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2024
So there's been a lot of discussion in the reviews about if this is a beginner telescope or not. As a person who never touched a telescope (except maybe in high school a thousand years ago) until I decided it was something I wanted to try out this year, I emphatically say YES! This is a great beginner scope. Here's the problem with most people's definition of a "beginner" anything. They want it to be rock-bottom priced, and ultra-easy to use. The problem with this mentality, is that often you go so cheap that you wind up getting a product that does not really expose you to the prospective hobby, and while trying to find something ultra-easy to use, it winds up being extremely difficult because it lacks the more expensive tools that were specifically designed to enhance the human ability when performing certain tasks.... NET RESULT: You wind up putting the hobby down out of frustration without ever really trying it out. I think the reality with getting into telescoping (is that a word?) is that you have to first decide that it is something you truly want to try, so that you don't go by a $74 telescope at W*****t (like I did) and expect to actually be introduced to this hobby. So after trying the $74 failure I got this scope due to the (mostly) good reviews, and because of the brand name. Never being in the hobby myself, I still had heard of Celestron. Many reviews showed broken parts. This wasn't the case for me. Everything was intact and assembly was relatively easy for a novice. A few reviews said this was not a beginner telescope because you had to adjust the mirrors, which apparently was a very difficult task to do. I researched this requirement ahead of time, found that for just over $20 you can buy a laser collimator that allows you to do this adjustment in just a few minutes, and decided that wasn't too much to ask to have an opportunity to enjoy this hobby. P.S. when I got the telescope, I used the laser collimator just to find out that the mirrors were perfectly aligned and I didn't need to do any adjusting. But apparently mirror adjusting is inevitable with Newtonian telescopes, so I'll just keep the laser collimator in my kit bag. Now about the beginner using this scope: 1. The red dot starfinder is a life saver! At first I thought you could just look through the starfinder, see what you wanted to look at, then see it in the telescope. NOPE! You really need that red dot to put the object into the site picture of the scope (especially on a low MM eyepiece). My only complaint might be that I couldn't perfectly adjust the red dot. When I first got the scope I focused in on a house way down the street, then tried to calibrate the red dot so that it was pefectly centered on the center of what I saw in the eyepiece... It was close, but wasn't perfect. HOWEVER. It is more than sufficient for my beginning level telescoping. With my $74 flunkee scope, I would use the cross hairs to try to align the scope to an object, yet even on a large MM eyepiece I could never find anything smaller than the moon! With this red dot starfinder, I have (easily) been able to align the telescope to both Jupiter and Saturn. 2. I may have started of with the starfinder, but the equitorial mount is probably the show winner with this thing. Not to keep referring to my $74 fail, but it is good to have a frame of reference when explaining why sometimes you have to make an investment even for entry-level equipment into a hobby. The $74 fail used a super cheap camera tripod. Problem with these tripods is they don't adjust at a fine enough level to make the small changes to put an object into the site picture. And, despite the fact that the cheap scope didn't weigh anything, it still would drift on the tripod... basically making it impossible to do anything except look at the moon. The Celestron is big and heavy, yet the EQ mount holds it masterfully in position, but the real winner is the fine tuning knobs. I didn't realize just how fast objects move in space (I mean.. I get it. The earth is spinning at 1000 mph, I just never put that together to mean objects move out of a telescope site picture QUICKLY). But with one hand on the fine tuning knob, I can follow the object for a reasonable amount of time to enjoy viewing it. NOTE: I recently bought a motor that I am suppposed to be able to connect to the knob, so that it can automatically hold the picture for me (again... spending more to get the right tools to enjoy the new hobby). Only complaint I have is that one knob seems to be able to adjust indefinitely while the other can only change maybe 20 degrees (10 in each direction) before it hits a stop. After additional study, I think this is because space objects only move in one direction, so if you properly polar align the scope, you should only need one knob to get the object where you want (left and right) and then not touch that again, then solely use the (up and down) knob to follow the object as it moves in the sky... but hey.. I'm new.. I'll learn to use this better too :-) Other than that, the only thing left is the scope. Like I said, I've looked at Jupiter, Saturn, Moon. I can't really speak to the provided eyepieces. Understanding from my research about focal length, and deciding that as a beginner it would help if I had an adjustable eyepiece (so that I can start zoomed out, find the object easier, then zoom in), so I bypassed the provided eyepiece and went straight to a x2 barrow with an 8-24mm adjustable eyepiece. So far it's been great! Saturn is still a little small, so I'm going to see if I can go even smaller on MM and higher on barrow zoom to see if I can really clearly make out the rings. ....but do you see what Celestron did? They created a (relatively) affordable telescope that grabbed my interest in the hobby and now I am full on exploring new ways (EQ mount motors, higher zoom barrow, lower MM eyepieces) that I can explore the universe above!
Top critical review
92 people found this helpful
Hard to find a feature that actually works.
By Ryan on Reviewed in the United States on September 28, 2018
To state that that I was disappointed in this telescope is an understatement. I have never been so saddened and disappointed by a reasonably expensive product in my entire life. I also wish that my poor wife and I could get the entire month we wasted back from struggling with this thing. As of now, I just feel empty inside. All my aggravation and sadness having been spent. I don't think I have ever, in my life, felt so badly about buying something. I feel like I wasted a LOT of money on what ended up being a "garage decoration." I really gave it a good struggle for a whole month of working on it every single day, trying to fix something else that was broken, putting something else on my drill press to modify or repair something else. At the end, I gave up. There's no use for more modifying, fighting, and continued disappointment. It's so bad that I refuse to curse someone else by selling or giving it away, and it's probably just going to go to the recycle center. To be completely fair, I have had a Celestron microscope for years, and it is excellent. I really love it. After having had such a positive experience with their microscope, I felt relatively confident about buying from Celestron, again. I don't know if I'll ever purchase anything telescope related from them, ever, after experiencing this abysmal horror, and this is my warning to anyone else who buys one of these. I'm really sorry, Celestron, but I have to tell the truth. Pros: The tripod is lightweight and pretty sturdy. The locking knobs for the tripod work well. Assembly took a while, but was fairly straight forward, and the provided instructions were easy to understand. I'm really struggling, here, to find another pro. There was no other pros. None. Cons: 1. The Right Ascension indicator, which is non-adjustable, broke free, and now just spins freely, so that now, zeroing it for polar alignment is just poor, sloppy guesswork. 2. While I had the mount partially disassembled, trying to see what I could do to fix the RA indicator, I noticed that instead of bearings, they use three cheap slices of plastic, like the kind you find in blister packs or product packaging. Two of them had already broken, so I had to toss them. 3. The RA and Declination indicator hash marks and numbers started rubbing off, nearly immediately. The scope cover simply falls off at the slightest touch. 4. The finderscope was mounted so badly out of alignment that the dials wouldn't adjust far enough to line it up. I ended up having to drill two holes in the tube to mount an aftermarket finder. I tossed the useless original finder into the trash. 5. The focuser isn't centered on the telescope tube, and is non-adjustable, such that, after you collimate your telescope, you're only collimated for one focus position. That one took me hours of pain to discover. Tightning the resistance spring helped a little, but at the end, it's still misaligned. 6. The soft rubber grips on the focuser tend to just slip around in a circle, instead of turning the knobs. The mirror has a mild aberration, from the factory, such that a 1/3 section of a star looks vaguely like a streak. maybe that's also a symptom of the focuser, as well. 7. The factory 20mm eyepiece is all but useless. I don't even know why they included it, except to add extra "challenge." The worm gears on the equatorial mount grind and seize, grind and seize. You'll never get lined up on what you're looking at. The right ascension knob also gives plenty of declination, because there's so much slop in it, and vice versa. 8. The lock knobs are very difficult to tighten down far enough to keep your scope from moving, and often, simply switching eyepieces causes the whole thing to slew. 9. The mount bounces up and down or bends at the slightest touch, because it isn't engineered to be sturdy enough, which makes wrestling with the grinding gears on the mount extra fun. 10. The mount is designed such, that, trying to point the scope anywhere within 20 degrees or so from straight overhead is impossible, because it bumps against itself, or the tripod. 11. Even when not pointing the telescope up, one of the locking knobs bumps and scrapes against the right ascension dial, because it wasn't engineered with enough clearance. As the elevation dial is essentially useless, my recommendation is probably to completely remove the RA dial, as well, to provide proper clearance.
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