Customer Reviews

Celestron 31045 AstroMaster 130 EQ Reflector Telescope

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm very pleased with this telescope. I've always looked up at the stars in wonder, now I can see more then I thought were out there. This is a great starter scope, from what I've been told by people who love this hobby. The telescope lets you view the sky to see stars you can't see with your eyes. I'm disappointed in the eye piece you receive with it though. The field of view is very narrow, hard to find the stars you want to see. I was given a wide angle eye piece, to use from a friend, which made my viewing pleasure wonderful. I went from looking at a 13" color tv to a 36" color tv. That's the best way to describe it.

I'm glad I got my telescope and will enjoy it for years to come.

Kevin

This was my first telescope. Let me just say that I'm very impressed with what I see. On my first night out with it I was able to see Jupiter and some of its moons. I was able to make out the red and white bands of clouds too!! It wasn't huge in the eyepiece, but hey, we're not using the Hubble Telescope here. I even got a good look at Saturn as well. Saturn was literally this big -0- and that was with a 9mm eye piece.

Now, I bought the accessory kit and I highly recommend getting it with this scope. I love the 32mm eyepiece for great eye relief and the 2x barlow even better. Don't plan on using the 4mm for anything but the moon and even then it's a little too much for this telescope.

The spotting scope on the top of this thing is a joke. I took mine off. I just start with the 32mm lens "aim" at what i want to look at, and then start stepping the lenses down.

All in all, I would recommend this as a good starter scope. Just point and enjoy. Who needs motor driven gps mounts that take forever to set up.

The optical quality is quite good, with a good field of view and very limited spider effect. The star pointer is fair to poor however if used with a low power lens (25mm or larger) it will suffice. Barlow usage is excellent and I'm amazed at lunar observation. Only other gripe is when slewing at a low polar angle you can run into the knobs. Mount seems solid however I don't care for the dec. setup. The focuser could stand a little more travel but is adequate for this scopes capability. Overall I give it 5 stars for lunar and terrestrial use, four and a half for planetary (excellent on Jupiter and Venus, struggles with Neptune and Uranus) but with some filters I hope to improve that. Deep sky is fair. The star finder I give a one.

Well, I spent allot of time researching a good beginner scope for myself and my family and after much deliberation I chose the Celestron Astromaster 130EQ. I think I need to look a bit more.

Pros:

1. Price: Very affordable, I got mine on sale for $213.
2. Optics: Very good and clear for this price point.
3. Appearance: Very cool looking scope, impressive.

Cons: (PLEASE PAY ATTENTION!!!!, I'm Not Kidding)

1. Mount: Ummm, Check Please! The German Equatorial mount supplied might as well be a solid block of steel, that would be about as easy to adjust and MUCH more stable, unacceptable. The Latitude adjustment screw requires gloves if you don't want permanent indentations in your fingers. Mine would actually make the whole scope jerk sideways when you would engage it, it's a heavy scope and allot of the weight is exerted on this adjustment, even if you balance the scope correctly. The Declination adjustment was stiff and would not track smoothly...and forget turning the scope....see a trend here?
2. Tripod: Solid Steel construction....."Solid"??? I'll put it this way, Steel is a solid, so is Silly Putty. As long as you DO NOT plan to fully extend the tripod legs and view it upright it's more stable than Silly Putty. But if you want to stand as you view the sky (most adults would prefer that to bending over like you're talking to a 2 year old) once the legs are fully extended it just adds to the shakiness. Brother!
3. Focus: Are you good at "Estimating"? You'll have to be to focus this thing; any time you even touch this thing (or breathe on it) the objects in the eyepiece do their best 7.5 earthquake impersonation. Once you wait a day or so, it stops shaking.....Now....DON'T TOUCH IT! VERY Frustrating, by the time I got Jupiter and its moons in focus it had practically moved out of view. But Jupiter was VERY cool to see.

The Viewfinder has been trashed by allot of people for being inaccurate and basically useless, maybe I lucked out because mine actually worked well. Too bad the rest of the scope didn't.

So there it is, it's a really great scope crippled by a cheap mount and tripod. At this price point it's a good Kids Scope and for adults who are not too picky about trivial things like being able to focus and see what you're looking at clearly.

I'm returning mine and going back on the Good Scope Hunt, BTW Amazon does not pay for return shipping on this item, I had a $25 gift certificate that I used to get my purchase price down to $188, kiss that goodbye, return shipping was $28.

Oh well, live and learn...and return.

Let me say right from the start that you must set up some parameters or boundaries to work within when shopping and comparing performance, features, etc. When I was shopping around I kept asking myself what if a spend a little more, over and over. By the end of my browsing session I'm seriously considering a 16" light bridge truss dobsonian. So here's the highlights.

1. Looks. I think you'll be hard pressed to find anything in this price range that looks more the part. I really like the orange annodized alum. bits & pieces. They really pop against the metallic blue optical tube. To me this thing looks like more scope than it really is.

2. Apeture. 130mm is about as big as you'll find at this price point. Apeture is everything. The more the merrier. Do not get caught up in the magnification hype that is very common in department store telescopes. As a matter of fact this scope does not have very high power as supplied. With it's reletively short focal length, you'll need a barlow lens to get some big mag. numbers.

3. Mount. Since I come from a cheap department store scope background, this is the best mount I've owned. Now that said, it is still very light, and there are plastic bits on the telescoping legs that will break if you get over assertive when tightening fittings. To a serious amature astronomer this thing is probably shakier than a Chihuahua at the north pole. The tripod probably is the weakest link in the package. THe legs are steel, but of the shower curtain rod wieght, not electrical conduit weight. It's probably the best place for them to skimp, in my opinion. There are tricks to make a mount more stable, but most of us don't want to grind our own optics at home. If you keep your hands off the scope while observing, it's more than stable enough for some good viewing. It will take some time for it to settle down after focusing, but that's what we have to deal whith at this price point.

4. Optics. They seem pretty good. I get sharp points when viewing stars. I've found nebulae for myself for the first time with this scope. It's small and light enough to grab and go, which is how I use it so far. The viewfinder is on the weak side. It's a red dot finder with no magnification. That's not the bad part. It's that they used plastic lenses that definately eat some of the light passing through, and also seem to illuminate a slight bit when the red dot is on. Combined with the positions you may have to contort yourself in when viewing objects near azimuth, it's my least liked feature on this scope.

5. Overall you get good apeture and optics for the money, it's nice enough looking to leave set up in a corner. You get an equatorial mount that can be motor upgraded cheaply. I'm happy with my purchase, and I've since spent more money on eye pieces and accesories than I originally spent on the scope itself.

The star finder is a joke. It will be by luck alone that you are able to find distant objects. It needs a much more finely tuned focuser as well, it is impossible to focus on more distant objects and see any detail at all. I have gotten many good views of the moon, but the planets and other objects are too blurry to see any detail at all. I purchaced high quality lenses, which help, however they are too much for the scope and were more for a higher quality telescope. With a ton of patience, and keeping your expectations in check, this can be a decent scope. The motor mount (optional) is a must to keep track of objects. It is way hard to manually track, keep focus, and enjoy planets and smaller objects.

The telescope itself is great but the tripod that is needed to hold it broke really easily. It does not make sense to support an excellent telescope with a base that is not stucturally sound. We contacted the maker, Celestron for a replacement part and were sent a broken replacement piece.

It's a nice telescope for the price, I got it recently from Amazon. The packing was good, despite I'm out of USA (I'm in Panama) it arrived in perfect conditions. The optical elements of the scope are nice and EQ mounting is easy to assemble. So far, I had been watching the moon and it's amazing the details you can see. I never imagine that with such a low price telescope I could see that much details of the moon. Now, I'm taking picture with the Celestron Imager CCD camera and I just can say that the pictures and videos you can take are just wonderful. The only thing that I can't use accurately is the star pointer, it helps to give you an approximate direction of the targeted object but still need to move the scope, probably I need to adjust mine or learn how to use it more efficiently. Celestron has nice videos in YouTube with detailed instructions to assemble the telescope.
Anyway, if you are interested in looking at the moon and some of the solar system planets this is just the perfect selection of a telescope. I published a photo of the moon here in Amazon so it can be appreciated the images you can get with the AstroMaster 130EQ and the Celestron CCD Imager.

Despite all the negative reviews I have read about this product it was way better then I expected. It looks like they redid a few things. the tripod is not weak anymore and the base of the telescope itself is totally different then in the pictures and directions . much much better built then what is shown. I had no problems at all viewing the moon and a few other constellations. The lenses I had for my mead fit this telescope perfectly . this was a big plus since I own so many lenses that i had gotten for the mead telescope. I am very pleased with this telescope.

Already I have had opportunity to do a few tests of this telescope and can comment to them that the image is excellent.
The construction and the design is robust enough.
Only I found two negative details of design.

First the screw that is used for adjustment of this latitude evil designed.
When one increases the latitude due to the weight of the this assembly it becomes hard to manipulate and when one tries to diminish the latitude, that is to say to slacken the screw in order that the set goes down, the plastic piece separates of the metallic screw turning out to be very inconvinient to do that the assembly goes down almost to the point of remaining united.

I come second, the unions of the tripod of stainless steel to the assembly are plastic, these should be metallurgies to give him better permanence in the time.


A recommendation for CELESTRON, they must improve the protection of the packing of the Mount CG3, it(he) is not alone to put it in a box without any protection, this one should come protected by rubber(gum), to avoid what happened to me, that in the sending(parcel) and due to the weight of the mount, the mount I strike and there was doubled the screw of Slow Movement in DEC.

Lamentably I cannot do claim for guarantee since I am in Venezuela, and the costs of movement going and return of the equipment(team) they be be very high in comparison with the cost of the Telescope. I do not still have mas remedy that to try to repair the piece.

David Trujillo P.
Barquisimeto, Edo. Lara
Venezuela



Español.
Ya he tenido oportunidad de hacer unas pruebas de este telescopio y les puedo comentar que la imagen es excelente.
La construcción y el diseño es bastante robusta.
Solo encontré dos detalles negativos de diseño.

Primero el tornillo que se usa para ajuste de latitud esta mal diseñado.
Cuando uno incrementa la latitud debido al peso del montaje este se torna duro para manipular y cuando uno intenta disminuir la latitud, es decir aflojar el tornillo para que el conjunto baje, la pieza plástica se separa del tornillo metálico resultando muy incomodo hacer que el montaje baje casi al punto de quedarse trabado.

Segundo, las uniones del trípode de acero inoxidable al montaje son plásticas, estas deberían ser metálicas para darle mejor durabilidad en el tiempo.

Una recomendación para CELESTRON, deben mejorar la proteccion del empaque de la Montura CG3, no es solo ponerlo en una caja sin ninguna protección, este debería venir protegido por goma, para evitar lo que me pasó, que en el envío y debido al peso de la montura, la montura se golpeo y se dobló el tornillo de Movimiento Lento en DEC.

Lamentablemente no puedo hacer reclamo por garantía ya que me encuentro en Venezuela, y los costos de traslado ida y vuelta del equipo serían muy altos en comparación con el costo del Telescopio. No me queda mas remedio que tratar de reparar la pieza.

David Trujillo P.
Barquisimeto, Edo. Lara
Venezuela